Program Basics - Page 2

The layout of the application should look somewhat familiar to developers who have used any of the imaging or photo editing software that has been available for years. The Stage is the part of the application where the file is created. It can easily be adjusted using pixel, inches, centimeters, or other forms of measurement. There are layers to organize Objects, making sure that they are on top of one another properly, using them to 'tween' from one point to another. A Timeline is provided to create the movements, while Keyframes determine where they are to begin and end, along with a place to define some ActionScripting, if required.

Scenes can also be used to keep the various aspects of the movie organized. To begin the movie, a loading scene can be created to play and loop while the rest of the movie is loading in the background, thereby preventing any slowdown once the movie starts playing.

Objects refer to various formats that can be created within the program. They can consist of graphics, movie clips, buttons, or audio clips. If an object is used repeatedly in the movie, the final file will not increase in size, allowing the downloaded page to start quicker. Let's say for example you create a ball image and the file size is one kilobyte. If you use it once the file size is one kilobyte, and if you were to use it a hundred times the file size would still be one kilobyte. A Graphic is just as the name suggests: a static image. A Movie Clip is a clip that plays itself independently from others and can be assigned its own actions. A Button can be used to begin an action such as launch a URL, send an e-mail, start another movie clip, go to a particular part of the movie, or many other different functions.

All of the objects are stored inside of a Library. This allows the user to simply click and drag objects onto the stage from the library in order to use them. In order to keep things totally organized, directories can be created inside of the library in order to place similar objects together.

Drawing tools are available for the creation of vector-based objects. For my own promotional material I created my company logo in Flash, exported it into an Adobe Illustrator format and use it on business cards, invoices, and for advertising supplements. While you can create and export images of various file formats from Flash, you can import both vector and bitmaps into the application for use in a Flash movie. Both formats can be manipulated using the tools available. JPG, GIF, PNG and TIFF formats, along with others, can also be imported. An option called Trace Bitmap helps to turn the image into a vector image, and may help to control the final size of the exported file.

There is even the ability to take the export file that Flash creates and produce a Projector file that is executable, making it easily e-mailed or downloaded from a Web site. The file doesn't require an Internet connection to work. Therefore if you wanted to create a game for a Web site, it could run online or be downloaded for use on a local system.

Now that you have an idea of some of the basic features of the Flash 5 application, let's take the time to go over some of the new and exciting aspects that weren't in previous versions. It will give both new and experienced Flash developers an idea of what else can be achieved with the updated program.

Flash 5
Flash 5
Updates and Changes - Page 3