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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Copyright © 2005 Macromedia, Inc. All rights reserved. This manual may not be copied, photocopied, reproduced,
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Macromedia, Inc. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the owner or authorized user of a valid copy of the software with which
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commercial purposes, such as selling copies of this documentation or providing paid-for support services.
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
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3
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
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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
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5
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.
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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.
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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/.
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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.
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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
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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
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