MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-GETTING STARTED WITH FLASH User manual

Getting Started with Flash

000_Getting_Started.book Page 1 Friday, September 2, 2005 12:22 PM

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Part Number ZPF80M100A

Acknowledgments

Project Management: Sheila McGinn

Writing: Jay Armstrong

Managing Editor: Rosana Francescato

Lead Editor: Lisa Stanziano

Editing: Geta Carlson, Evelyn Eldridge, Mark Nigara

Production Management: Patrice O’Neill, Kristin Conradi, Yuko Yagi

Media Design and Production: Adam Barnett, Aaron Begley, Paul Benkman. John Francis, Geeta Karmarkar, Masayo Noda,

Paul Rangel, Arena Reed, Mario Reynoso

Special thanks to Jody Bleyle, Mary Burger, Lisa Friendly, Stephanie Gowin, Bonnie Loo, Mary Ann Walsh, Erick Vera, the beta

testers, and the entire Flash and Flash Player engineering and QA teams.

First Edition: September 2005

Macromedia, Inc.

601 Townsend St.

San Francisco, CA 94103

000_Getting_Started.book Page 2 Friday, September 2, 2005 12:22 PM

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

What is Flash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

What you can do with Flash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Making a simple Flash document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

About Flash Player. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

What’s new in Flash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Installing Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Chapter 1: Learning Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27

Where to start . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Get the most from the Flash documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Accessing the Flash documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Accessing additional online Flash resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Choosing the right help books. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

Using the Flash help system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Opening the Help panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Searching the help system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Using context-sensitive help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Printing the Flash documentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Purchasing printed documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Discussing the Flash documentation with LiveDocs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Controlling the appearance of the Help panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47

Getting updates to Flash Help. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Chapter 2: Flash Basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

About Flash files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Getting to know the workspace. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

000_Getting_Started.book Page 3 Friday, September 2, 2005 12:22 PM

4Contents

Chapter 3: Tutorial: Building Your First Flash Application . . . . .95

Review your task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

Examine the completed application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

Create a working folder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

Create a new document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Create symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Edit a symbol Timeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

Add actions to frames. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

Add labels to frames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

Add motion tweens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110

Edit the main Timeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .112

Create the border. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113

Add a symbol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119

Add a text box. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

Add the movie clip to the Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

Add a button component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

Add ActionScript code. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

Publish your document. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .131

Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Chapter 4: Tutorial: Building a Video Player

(Flash Professional only) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Review your task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

Examine the completed application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

Create a working folder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

Encode a video file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

Create a new Flash document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

Add a media component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

Publish your document. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

The next steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

000_Getting_Started.book Page 4 Friday, September 2, 2005 12:22 PM

Introduction

Welcome to Macromedia Flash Basic 8 and Macromedia Flash

Professional 8. 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 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:

What is Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

What you can do with Flash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Making a simple Flash document. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

About Flash Player. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

What’s new in Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

Installing Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20

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.

000_Getting_Started.book Page 5 Friday, September 2, 2005 12:22 PM

6Introduction

Flash is extremely well suited to creating content for delivery over the

Internet because its files are very small. Flash achieves this through its

extensive use of vector graphics. Vector graphics require significantly less

memory and storage space than bitmap graphics because they are

represented by mathematical formulas instead of large data sets. Bitmap

graphics are larger because each individual pixel in the image requires a

separate piece of data to represent it.

To build an application in Flash, you create graphics with the Flash

drawing tools and import additional media elements into your Flash

document. Next, you define how and when you want to use each of those

elements to create the application you have in mind.

When you author content in Flash, you work in a Flash document file.

Flash documents have the file extension .fla (FLA). A Flash document has

four main parts:

The Stage is where your graphics, videos, buttons, and so on appear

during playback. The Stage is described further in “Flash Basics”

on page 49.

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.

The Library panel is where Flash displays a list of the media elements in

your Flash document.

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.

Flash includes many features that make it powerful but easy to use, such as

prebuilt drag-and-drop user interface components, built-in behaviors that

let you easily add ActionScript to your document, and special effects that

you can add to media objects.

000_Getting_Started.book Page 6 Friday, September 2, 2005 12:22 PM

What you can do with Flash 7

When you have finished authoring your Flash document, you publish it

using the File > Publish command. This creates a compressed version of

your file with the extension .swf (SWF). You can then use Flash Player to

play the SWF file in a web browser or as a stand-alone application. For an

introduction to Flash Player, see “About Flash Player” on page 17.

What you can do with Flash

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:

Animations These include banner ads, online greeting cards, cartoons,

and so on. Many other types of Flash applications include animation

elements as well.

Games Many games are built with Flash. Games usually combine the

animation capabilities of Flash with the logic capabilities of ActionScript.

User interfaces Many website designers use Flash to design user

interfaces. The interfaces include simple navigation bars as well as much

more complex interfaces. You can find an example of a navigation bar

created with Flash across the top of the www.macromedia.com home page.

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. You can find an example of an FMA on the

www.macromedia.com home page. The tutorial in “Tutorial: Building

Your First Flash Application” on page 95 guides you through the process of

building an FMA.

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.

You can find many examples of real projects created by Flash users on the

Macromedia website at www.macromedia.com/cfusion/showcase/.

000_Getting_Started.book Page 7 Friday, September 2, 2005 12:22 PM

8Introduction

To build a Flash application, you typically perform the following

basic steps:

1. Decide which basic tasks the application will perform.

2. Create and import media elements, such as images, video, sound, text,

and so on.

3. Arrange the media elements on the Stage and in the Timeline to define

when and how they appear in your application.

4. Apply special effects to media elements as you see fit.

5. Write ActionScript code to control how the media elements behave,

including how the elements respond to user interactions.

6. Test your application to determine if it is working as planned and find

any bugs in its construction. Test your application throughout the

creation process.

7. Publish your FLA file as a SWF file that can be displayed in a web page

and played back with Flash Player.

Depending on your project and your working style, you may use these

steps in a different order. As you become familiar with Flash and its

workflows, you will discover a style of working that suits you best.

Making a simple Flash document

To illustrate the basic steps of creating any Flash document, this section

guides you through the process in a simple tutorial. This short tutorial is

just a sample of the Flash workflow. More tutorials are available in

“Tutorial: Building Your First Flash Application” and in Flash Tutorials.

The first step is to create a new document in Flash.

To create a new Flash document:

1. Select File > New.

2. In the New Document dialog box, Flash Document is selected

by default.

Click OK.

In the Property inspector, the Size button displays the current Stage size

setting as 550 x 400 pixels.

000_Getting_Started.book Page 8 Friday, September 2, 2005 12:22 PM

Making a simple Flash document 9

3. The Background color swatch is set to white. You can change the color

of the Stage by clicking the swatch and selecting a different color.

The Property inspector, showing the Stage size and background color

Drawing a circle

After you’ve created your document, you are ready to add some artwork for

the document.

To draw a circle on the Stage:

1. Select the Oval tool from the Tools panel.

The Oval tool in the Tools panel

000_Getting_Started.book Page 9 Friday, September 2, 2005 12:22 PM

10 Introduction

2. Select the No Color option from the Stroke Color Picker.

Selecting the No Color option in the Stroke Color Picker

3. Select a color of your choice from the Fill Color Picker.

Make sure the fill color contrasts well with the Stage color.

4. Draw a circle on the Stage by selecting the Oval tool and Shift-dragging

on the Stage.

Holding the Shift key constrains the Oval tool to a circle.

The circle shape drawn on the Stage

000_Getting_Started.book Page 10 Friday, September 2, 2005 12:22 PM

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