Flash Tutorials

Introduction to Flash Professional 8




What is Flash?

Flash is an authoring tool that designers and developers use to create presentations, applications, and other content that enables user interaction. Flash projects can include simple animations, video content, complex presentations, applications, and everything in between. In general, individual pieces of content made with Flash are called applications, even though they might only be a basic animation. You can make media-rich Flash applications by including pictures, sound, video, and special effects.

• What are the main part of Flash?

1. The Stage --- is where your graphics, videos, buttons, and so on appear during playback. The Stage is described further in Flash Basics.
   
2. The Timeline is where you tell Flash when you want the graphics and other elements of your project to appear. You also use the Timeline to specify the layering order of graphics on the Stage. Graphics in higher layers appear on top of graphics in lower layers.
   
3. The Library panel is where Flash displays a list of the media elements in your Flash document.
   
4. ActionScript code allows you to add interactivity to the media elements in your document. For example, you can add code that causes a button to display a new image when the user clicks it. You can also use ActionScript to add logic to your applications. Logic enables your application to behave in different ways depending on the user's actions or other conditions. Flash includes two versions of ActionScript, each suited to an author's specific needs. For more information about writing ActionScript, see Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Flash in the Help panel.

• What you can do with Flash?

There's so much you can do with Flash and so easy to learn and use. With the wide array of features in Flash, you can create many types of applications. The following are some examples of the kinds of applications Flash can generate:

1. Animations - These include banner ads, online greeting cards, cartoons, and so on. Many other types of Flash applications include animation elements as well.
2. Games - Many games are built with Flash. Games usually combine the animation capabilities of Flash with the logic capabilities of ActionScript.
3. User interfaces - Many website designers use Flash to design user interfaces. The interfaces include simple navigation bars as well as much more complex interfaces.
4. Flexible messaging areas - These are areas in web pages that designers use for displaying information that may change over time. A flexible messaging area (FMA) on a restaurant website might display information about each day's menu specials.
5. Rich Internet applications - These include a wide spectrum of applications that provide a rich user interface for displaying and manipulating remotely stored data over the Internet. A rich Internet application could be a calendar application, a price-finding application, a shopping catalog, an education and testing application, or any other application that presents remote data with a graphically rich interface.

• What about Flash Files?

The primary Flash file type, FLA files, contain three basic types of information that comprise a Flash document. These include the following:

1. Media objects are the various graphic, text, sound and video objects that comprise the content of your Flash document. By importing or creating these elements in Flash and then arranging them on the Stage and in the Timeline, you define what the viewer of your document will see and when they will see it.
   
2. The Timeline is the place in Flash where you tell Flash when specific media objects should appear on the Stage. The Timeline is like a spreadsheet that progresses from left to right, with the columns representing time. The rows represent layers, with the content in higher layers appearing above lower layers' contents on the Stage.
   
3. ActionScript code is the programming code you can add to Flash documents to make them respond to user interactions and to more finely control the behavior of your Flash documents. Much can be accomplished in Flash without ActionScript, but using ActionScript offers many more possibilities.
   

Flash can be used to work with a variety of file types. Each type has a separate purpose. The following list describes each file type and its uses:

• FLA files are the primary files you work with in Flash. These are the files that contain the basic media, timeline, and script information for a Flash document.
  SWF files are the compressed versions of FLA files. These files are the ones you display in a web page.
  
• AS files are ActionScript files. You can use these files if you prefer to keep some or all of your ActionScript code outside of your FLA files. These can be helpful for code organization and for projects that have multiple people working on different parts of the Flash content.
  
• SWC files contain the reusable Flash components. Each SWC file contains a compiled movie clip, ActionScript code, and any other assets that the component requires.
  
• ASC files are files used to store ActionScript that will be executed on a computer running Flash Communication Server. These files provide the ability to implement server-side logic that works in conjunction with ActionScript in a SWF file.
  
• JSFL files are JavaScript files that you can use to add new functionality to the Flash authoring tool. See Extending Flash for more information.
  
• FLP files are Flash Project files (Flash Professional only). You can use Flash Projects to manage multiple document files in a single project. Flash Projects allow you to group multiple, related files together to create complex applications.

Now you know the main part and the file types of Flash Pro 8, let's start on how to use them all.

The Main Part of Flash

Stage:

• is the rectangular area where you place graphic content, including vector art, text boxes, buttons, imported bitmap graphics or video clips, and so on when creating Flash documents. The Stage in the Flash authoring environment represents the rectangular space in Macromedia Flash Player or in a web browser window where your Flash document appears during playback. You can zoom in and out to change the view of the Stage as you work.

Timeline:

• organizes and controls a document's content over time in layers and frames. Like films, Flash documents divide lengths of time into frames. Layers are like multiple film strips stacked on top of one another, each containing a different image that appears on the Stage. The major components of the Timeline are layers, frames, and the playhead.
  Layers in a document are listed in a column on the left side of the Timeline. Frames contained in each layer appear in a row to the right of the layer name. The Timeline header at the top of the Timeline indicates frame numbers. The playhead indicates the current frame displayed on the Stage. As a Flash document plays, the playhead moves from left to right through the Timeline.
  The Timeline status display at the bottom of the Timeline indicates the selected frame number, the current frame rate, and the elapsed time to the current frame.
  
  

NOTE: When an animation is played, the actual frame rate is displayed; this may differ from the document's frame rate setting if the computer can't calculate and display the animation quickly enough.

You can change the way frames appear in the Timeline, as well as display thumbnails of frame content in the Timeline. The Timeline shows where animation occurs in a document, including frame-by-frame animation, tweened animation, and motion paths. Controls in the layers section of the Timeline let you hide, show, lock, or unlock layers, as well as display layer contents as outlines.You can insert, delete, select, and move frames in the Timeline. You can also drag frames to a new location on the same layer or to a different layer.

How do we change background and Stage size?

The Stage provides a preview of how your Flash content will appear in your published file. You'll change the size of the Stage to accommodate artwork designed for a larger Stage, and you'll change the background color of the Stage.

• In the Tools panel, click the Selection tool.
  
• On the Stage, click anywhere in the gray workspace that surrounds the Stage, or on the background area of the Stage, so that no objects are selected.
  
• The Property inspector, under the Stage, displays properties for the document when no objects are selected.
  
• To change the Stage background color, click the Background color box and select a light shade of gray, such as gray with the hexadecimal value of #CCCCCC.
  To change the Stage size, click Size in the Property inspector. In the Document Properties dialog box, enter 750 for the Stage width, and then click OK.
  
• The Stage resizes to 750 pixels wide.

Add graphics to the Stage

To add library items to your document, you verify that you're adding the object to the correct layer, and then drag the item from the Library panel to the Stage.

• In the Timeline, click the Content layer name to select that layer. With the Selection tool selected, drag the Title movie clip, which contains a bitmap image and vector graphic, from the Library panel to the Stage and align it on top of the gray bar at the top of the Stage that contains the word Title.
  
• In Flash, you can work with bitmap images, which describe graphics using pixels, and vector art, which uses mathematical representation to describe art.
• With the Content layer still selected, drag the text symbol from the Library panel to Stage, and align it with the Trio ZX2004 text that's already in place as a guide. You can use your keyboard arrow keys to nudge the text into place.
  
• The title text is actually a graphic created from text.