If you haven’t got a chance to try out the BJC bit component set, originally written by Keith Peters (who else!), here’s a darn good reason: the resizer. This little component’s made my day. What it does is resize a movieclip or bitmap, but it can keep margins that don’t resize.

Say you have a ‘panel’ movieclip that you would like to use as a background for controls. Say it’s a rounded rectangle with a drop shadow. If you want to resize the panel, but keep the proportions of the corners, the good old way is to do it HTML-table style: 4 movieclips for the corners that you will move, 4 for the sides that you will scale AND move, and a ninth for the center of the movieclip.

The Resizer makes this much, much easier. Just make your panel mockup into a movie clip, assign it a linkage name, drop a resizer instance on stage, and set the linkage name appropriately. Set the margins of the movieclip. You now have a panel that resizes! What you say? Here’s an example:

This is simply a screenshot of the Fireworks layer panel, which is assigned to a resizer with some large margins. You can see where in the movieclip it stretches using the sliders. I was feeling lazy, so this one actually uses data binding to set the height and width; total lines of code in this example: 0!