MACROMEDIA DIRECTOR MX 2004-GETTING STARTED WITH... User manual

Getting Started with Flash

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Acknowledgments

Director: Erick Vera

Project Management: Julee Burdekin, Erick Vera

Writing: Jay Armstrong, Jody Bleyle, Mary Burger, Francis Cheng, Jen deHaan, Stephanie Gowin, Phillip Heinz, Shimul Rahim,

Samuel R. Neff

Managing Editor: Rosana Francescato

Editing: Mary Ferguson, Mary Kraemer, Noreen Maher, Antonio Padial, Lisa Stanziano, Anne Szabla

Production Management: Patrice O’Neill

Media Design and Production: Adam Barnett, Christopher Basmajian, Aaron Begley, John Francis

Second Edition: June 2004

Macromedia, Inc.

600 Townsend St.

San Francisco, CA 94103

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: Getting Started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

About Flash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

About Flash Player . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

What’s new in Flash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Guide to instructional media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Using the Start page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

CHAPTER 2: Installing Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

System requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Installing and activating Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Configuration folders installed with Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Changing or removing Flash Player . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Configuring a server for Flash Player . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

CHAPTER 3: Getting to Know the Workspace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Using the Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Using the Timeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Using frames and keyframes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Using layers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

About the main toolbar and edit bar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Using the Tools panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Using the grid, guides, and rulers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Using panels and the Property inspector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Setting preferences in Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Customizing keyboard shortcuts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Using context menus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Accessibility in the Flash authoring environment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

4 Contents

CHAPTER 4: Building Your First Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Workflow for building an application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Examine a completed application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Create a new document. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Add media content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Add navigation controls. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Add motion and basic interactivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Test the application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Publish and view the application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

The next steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

CHAPTER 1

Getting Started

Welcome to Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004. Flash

provides everything you need to create and deliver rich web content and powerful applications.

Whether you’re designing motion graphics or building data-driven applications, Flash has the

tools necessary to produce great results and deliver the best user experience across multiple

platforms and devices.

This guide is designed to introduce you to Flash. The tutorial in this guide leads you through the

process of creating a simple Flash application.

This chapter contains the following sections:

About Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

About Flash Player . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

What’s new in Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Guide to instructional media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Using the Start page. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

About Flash

Flash is an authoring tool that allows you to create anything from a simple animation to a

complex interactive web application, such as an online store. You can make your Flash

applications media rich by adding pictures, sound, and video. Flash includes many features that

make it powerful but easy to use, such as drag-and-drop user interface components, built-in

behaviors that add ActionScript to your document, and special effects that you can add to objects.

When you author in Flash you work in a Flash document, a file that, when saved, has the file

extension .fla. When you are ready to deploy your Flash content, you publish it, creating a file

with the extension .swf. Flash Player, described in the next section, runs the SWF file.

6 Chapter 1: Getting Started

About Flash Player

Macromedia Flash Player 7, which runs the applications that you create, installs by default along

with Flash. Flash Player ensures that all SWF content is viewable and available consistently and

across the broadest range of platforms, browsers, and devices.

The Macromedia Flash Player is distributed with products from every major partner, including

Microsoft, Apple, Netscape, AOL, and Opera, to bring rich content and applications

immediately to over 516 million people worldwide. Flash Player is distributed freely to anyone

who wants to use it. You can get the latest version of Flash Player at the Macromedia Flash Player

Download Center at www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer.

What’s new in Flash

There are now two editions of Flash: Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional 2004. To verify

which edition you have installed, select Help > About Flash in the application.

Flash MX 2004 Flash MX 2004 is the perfect tool for the web designer, interactive media

professional, or subject matter expert developing multimedia content. Emphasis is on creation,

import, and manipulation of many types of media (audio, video, bitmaps, vectors, text, and data).

Flash MX Professional 2004 Flash MX Professional 2004 is designed for advanced web

designers and application builders. Flash MX Professional 2004 includes all the features of Flash

MX 2004, along with several powerful new tools. It provides project-management tools for

optimizing the workflow between the members of a web team made up of designers and

developers. External scripting and capabilities for handling dynamic data from databases are some

of the features that make Flash particularly suitable for large-scale, complex projects deployed

using Flash Player along with a hybrid of HTML content.

New features available in both Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX

Professional 2004

The new features in Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional 2004 provide greater

productivity, enhanced rich media support, and streamlined publishing.

Productivity

Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional 2004 include many features designed specifically for

streamlining previously complex tasks, thereby improving productivity:

Timeline effects You can apply Timeline effects to any object on the Stage to quickly add

transitions and animations such as fade-ins, fly-ins, blurs, and spins. For more information, see

“Using Timeline effects” in Using Flash.

Behaviors With behaviors, you can add interactivity to Flash content without writing a line of

code. For example, you can use behaviors to include functionality that links to a website, loads

sounds and graphics, controls playback of embedded videos, plays movie clips, and triggers data

sources. For more information, see “Controlling instances with behaviors” in Using Flash.

What’s new in Flash 7

Accessibility support in the authoring environment Accessibility support in the Flash

authoring environment provides keyboard shortcuts for navigating and for using interface

controls, letting you work with these interface elements without using the mouse. For more

information, see “Accessibility in the Flash authoring environment” in Using Flash.

Updated templates Flash includes updated templates for creating presentations, e-learning

applications, advertisements, mobile device applications, and other commonly used types of Flash

documents. For more informations, see “Using templates” in Using Flash.

Integrated Help system The new Help panel provides in-context reference, ActionScript

reference, and lessons in the Flash authoring environment. For more information, see “Using the

Help panel” in Using Flash.

Spell checker The spell checker searches your text for spelling errors. For more information,

see “Checking spelling” in Using Flash.

Document tabs Tabs for each open document are displayed at the top of the workspace so that

you can quickly locate and switch between open documents. For more information, see “Using

document tabs for multiple documents (Windows only)” in Using Flash.

Start page The Start page puts commonly used tasks at your fingertips, in a central page. For

more information, see “Using the Start page” on page 13.

Find and Replace The Find and Replace feature locates and replaces a text string, a font, a

color, a symbol, a sound file, a video file, or an imported bitmap file. For more information, see

“Using Find and Replace” in Using Flash.

Rich media support

New rich media support features enhance the quality of rich media presentations.

High-fidelity import High-fidelity import lets you import Adobe PDF and Adobe Illustrator 10

files and preserve accurate vector representation of your source files. For more information, see

“Importing Adobe Illustrator, EPS, or PDF files” in Using Flash.

Video Import wizard The Video Import wizard simplifies video encoding and offers encoding

presets and clip editing. For more information, see “Using the Video Import wizard” in Using

Flash.

Small font size rendering Small font sizes are now rendered more crisply. For more

information, see “Creating text” in Using Flash.

Publishing

New publishing features make it easy to detect Flash Player versions, improve accessibility, and

simplify localization.

Flash Player detection You can now publish SWF files with associated files that detect if a user

has a specified Flash Player version. You can configure your published files to direct users to

alternate files if they don’t have the specified Flash Player. For more information, see “Configuring

publish settings for Flash Player detection” in Using Flash.

8 Chapter 1: Getting Started

Publish profiles You can create profiles to save your publish settings, then export the profiles

and use them across projects to publish consistently under different conditions. For more

information, see “Creating a publish profile” in Using Flash.

Accessibility and components New accessibility features and a new generation of components

offer tab ordering, tab focus management, and improved support for third-party screen readers

and closed-caption programs.

Globalization and Unicode Enhanced globalization and Unicode support allows multilanguage

authoring using any character set. For more information, see “Creating Multilanguage Text” in

Using Flash.

Strings panel The new Strings panel makes it easier to publish Flash content in multiple

languages. With the click of a few buttons, Flash creates external XML files for each specified

language. For more information, see “Creating Multilanguage Text” in Using Flash. You may need

to update your Help system to see this information.

Security Flash Player 7 enforces a stricter security model than previous versions of Flash Player.

Exact domain matching requires that the domain of the data to be accessed match the data

provider’s domain exactly in order for the domains to communicate. HTTPS/HTTP restriction

specifies that a SWF file using nonsecure (non-HTTPS) protocols cannot access content loaded

using a secure (HTTPS) protocol, even when both are in exactly the same domain. For more

information see “Flash Player security features” in Using ActionScript in Flash.

Other improvements

Flash Player performance has been greatly improved, and ActionScript has been enhanced to

comply with ECMA script language specifications. Also, Flash now tracks interactions so that

they can be converted to reusable commands.

Flash Player runtime performance Player runtime performance has been improved by a factor

of two to five times for video, scripting, and general display rendering.

ActionScript 2.0 ActionScript 2.0 is an object-oriented language that follows the ECMA script

language specification and supports inheritance, strong typing, and the event model. For more

information, see “ECMA-262 compliance” in Using ActionScript in Flash. You may need to

update your Help system to see this information.

History panel The History panel tracks your actions so that they can be converted to reusable

commands. For more information, see “Using the History panel” in Using Flash.

New features available in Flash MX Professional 2004 only

Flash MX Professional 2004 offers all the features available in Flash MX 2004, plus a variety of

new features to enhance application development and design. Features include the screen-based

visual development environment, and tools for managing data interactively and for fostering

team productivity.

Guide to instructional media 9

Screen-based visual development environment

A visual programming environment Flash MX Professional 2004 introduces a forms-based

visual programming environment, which is ideal for developing applications. For more

information, see “Slide screens and form screens (Flash Professional only)”in Using Flash.

Slides-based authoring Slide screens provide functionality designed for sequential

presentations. For more information, see “Slide screens and form screens (Flash Professional

only)” in Using Flash.

A new generation of components

Advanced components support New components now support focus management to control

tab navigation. Although the components have a new sophisticated design, you can easily reskin

them to modify their appearance. For more information, see “Benefits of using components” in

Using Components.

Data interactivity

Data binding Data binding allows you to connect any component to various data sources to

manipulate, display, and update data through components or ActionScript. For more

information, see Chapter 14, “Data Integration (Flash Professional Only)” in Using Flash.

Prebuilt data connectors for Web Services and XML New components allow you to connect

to web services and XML data sources easily. For more information, see Chapter 14, “Data

Integration (Flash Professional Only),” in Using Flash.

Performance improvements Performance improvements on large record sets allow your

application to work efficiently with large amounts of data.

Team productivity

Project management The Project panel enables centralized project file management, version

control, and workflow optimization for teams of Flash users working together. For more

information, see Chapter 2, “Working with Projects (Flash Professional Only),” in Using Flash.

Source code control Flash Professional provides source code control integration with plug-ins

to industry-leading source control systems such as Microsoft Visual Source Safe. For more

information, see Chapter 2, “Using version control with projects (Flash Professional only),” in

Using Flash.

Guide to instructional media

Flash contains a variety of media to help you learn the program quickly and become proficient in

creating your own Flash applications.

10 Chapter 1: Getting Started

About the electronic manuals and lessons

The following electronic manuals are available through the Help panel (Help > Help):

•Getting Started with Flash (or Getting Started Help) provides a hands-on introduction to Flash.

•Using Flash (or Using Flash Help) contains complete information on working in the Flash

authoring tool, including all commands, features, and user interface elements.

•Using Components contains information on adding and configuring components in a Flash

document, as well as information on creating components.

•Using ActionScript in Flash (or Using ActionScript Help)provides a conceptual introduction to

the ActionScript language

•Flash ActionScript Language Reference (or Flash ActionScript Language Reference Help)

documents all actions, methods, and properties in the ActionScript API.

If you are a new user, you’ll find the following information useful:

•Getting Started with Flash (or Getting Started Help) provides basic information about the Flash

workspace and guides you in creating a simple document.

•A series of lessons on the How Do I tab offer an introduction to using Flash. Refer to the

Quick Start, Basic Flash, and Basic ActionScript lessons (Help > How Do I).

Using the Help panel

The updatable Help panel provides access to information on how to use Flash. For more

information about the Help panel, see the following sections.

Accessing help

The tabs in the Help panel—Help and How Do I—contain the full set of user assistance

information provided with the Flash application.

•You can select the Help tab to display general help information.

•You can select the How Do I tab to display a list of 10–20 minute lessons that guide you

through many of the features in Flash.

To access help and the table of contents:

Select Help > Help to open the Help panel, or press F1.

If the table of contents is not visible, click the Table of Contents button to display the Table

of Contents pane.

A list of help books is displayed. The Help tab is selected by default.

Double-click a book to open it and display its topics.

Click a topic to select it.

To close the table of contents, click the X above the Table of Contents pane.

The Help panel contains context-sensitive Reference information which can be accessed from the

Actions panel.

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