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Working on Flash 8.0
Flash 8.0 is a very powerful and easy-to-use software developed by Macromedia, a software giant which delivers professional software like Dreamweaver, Flex, ColdFusion, FireWorks etc., apart from its biggest success, Flash. The company has been taken over by Adobe another giant. Flash 8.0 is an Integrated Development Tool to develop Flash applications, which is in wide use as Independent Applications, which comes in the form of Electronic Software and Hardware manuals and runs in a Flash Standalone Player (which must be installed before use). Flash is more widely used on the web in the form of advertisements and as a web page as such! It has gained a lot of popularity and widespread usage after the release of Flash 5.0. Flash 8.0 falls in this family and is considered to be the biggest release of Flash by Macromedia. As mentioned Flash is an Integrated Development Environment which “helps” to develop flash applications in a much easier way and helps in exploiting the potential of Flash applications to the fullest. The potential of Flash is unlimited and requires creativity from your side to make your work impressive. Here is a ten minute tutorial that helps to get to know what one can do with Flash. When you’re done reading this, you will be all set to try exploring Flash, which needs to be done to get extremely outstanding results. There are various modes in which you can work in Flash, depending on what you’re working on. To create a Flash document, select “Flash Document” which lets you do most of the work, then there is a “Flash presentation mode” for creating presentations and would be similar to PowerPoint, and finally a “Flash Form Application” mode which lets you create flash applications which focuses on form-based application creation. To create anything in Flash from small animations to large applications you must know what the “Timeline” is all about, which is the skeleton of any Flash work. The timeline consists of several “Frames” which can be associated with a “PowerPoint Slide”. You can form several layers of frames which are independent of each other, making organization and grouping of objects easier. The result of a “Flash work” is a “Movie” which plays a sequence of frames at the specified “Frame Rate”. You can adjust the frame rate to make the “Flash Movie” more or less smoother. The more the frame rate, the smoother will the resultant movie be. You can alter this by double clicking the current frame rate displayed on the bottom part of the timeline and this is expressed in frames per second (fps). Flash comes with well-equipped drawing tools, which enables you to draw vector graphics making “Flash Movies” scalable to any extent, which is the reason why they are of high quality. Most of the drawing tools must be familiar to you. For example, you have the pencil tool, which you can use to draw smooth drawings or spiky drawings based on the option you select. You have a paint brush tool, line tool, oval tool, rectangle tool etc… present in any popular drawing software. When you start a Flash Document, it automatically selects the “First Frame”, and you can draw anything on the screen, which is displayed beneath the timeline. Once you are done, try pressing “Ctrl + Enter” to view your drawing in a window. To create another frame, click on the frame then press “F6” or right click on the current frame and select “Insert Keyframe”. This creates the duplicate of the current frame, which lets you make any change that you like and you can go on doing this until your “Movie” is complete. You then press “Ctrl+Enter” and you can watch your movie play. If you don’t want to create a duplicate, you can always select the “Insert blank key frame” to create a blank frame and this lets you do your artwork from scratch. Another very powerful feature of Flash is its “Library”. You can make it appear at anytime by pressing “F11”. As your “Movie” grows more complex, you would want to organize it in an efficient manner, and that is where the Flash Library comes into play. You can organize “Symbols” in the Flash library. These are independent objects that have a separate timeline. The most widely used symbols in flash are the “Movie Clip” and the “Button”. Movie Clip can be considered to be another Flash movie within your flash movie, except that it runs in a separate timeline. “Button”, on the other hand, is used to create a button in a flash movie like other popular buttons such as “Continue”, “Skip intro” etc… Although you can do this in a movie clip (which requires you to have some knowledge of ActionScript), the button makes the job much easier. Follow similar steps when creating independent Key-Frames to create a button. Instead of numbers, the button-symbol timeline displays the text “Up”, “Over”, “Down” and “Hit”. This easily makes buttons by defining how the buttons behave when the mouse is clicked, moved over it, and released. All you need to do is to create Keyframes under each section and design how your button looks like in various states. On the other hand, let’s say you’re creating an E-card for Christmas; you would design a Christmas tree. Now suppose you want to add several glowing lights on the tree, all you need to do is create a Movie-Clip which contains the animation for a glowing light. Now drag the movie-clip from the library and place it wherever required. Each movie clip plays separately in its own timeline irrespective of the timeline in which it is placed. It is always advisable that you don’t clutter your main timeline; instead, organize them into independent “Symbols” and place them wherever necessary. Just think about “Symbols” in your movie like actors in films. Above all, the potential of Flash can never be judged without the mention of the powerful Action script built into it. It helps to control your movie through scripts, which can bring mathematical precision to your movies and of course make wonders. An action script is written for a particular frame or for a particular symbol. The syntax is a lot similar to that of JavaScript, and you are lucky if you know it. Although I can’t mention the entire Action script manual here, I CAN give you a couple of pointers. For example if you enter “stop();” in the action panel after selecting a frame, your “Flash Movie” comes to a halt at that point of time, but your movie clip still keeps playing, which is why I said that they (the symbols) have a separate timeline. You can write “gotoAndPlay ([frame number]);” so that your Flash Movie jumps to the frame number specified. After all, it comes with a very powerful help system and a Script Assist, which writes ActionScript code for you automatically, provided you give the required arguments. Please do check out the Help Section, as it is very powerful and easy to use and contains plenty of examples, enough to make you a Flash Guru. Enjoy Flash! Chillibreeze's disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. 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>> Read more articles written by Chillibreeze writers:1. Articles related to Content and Outsourcing
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