Despite the coolness factor of a feature like scale 9, the first time I’ve used it in a real project was just a few days ago. I was happy to finally have a place to use it but I managed to run into one of its main drawbacks that usually gets mentioned in passing or not at all.
If you rotate or skew a clip with scale 9 guides enabled, it will look different on the stage than it does when published. And by “different”, I mean completely wrong.
I created a photo frame movie clip with scale 9 guides set, layered the frame to a couple of photos, and dragged them to the stage. So far so good.
Everything worked as expected until I rotated the movie clips. On the stage while editing the file, the frames looked pretty bad.
After a little playing around I realized that despite their appearance on the stage, the frames scaled and rotated just fine in the published file. The image below is the same file viewed as a published SWF as opposed to an open FLA being editied.
