Flash Basics

Flash Design Environment

When you open Flash MX the first time you will see several working panels. You don’t need all of them all the time, so you may close or minimize them. As with any new program while you are learning how to use that you may “lose” necessary tools and forget where they are located. You may always choose Window – Panel sets – Default from the Menu and restore the default layout.

The Menu bar contains all major operations you need working with Flash MX. We will not explain them at once but refer to them as soon as they necessary for our exercises. For now we only discuss saving files.

Save and Save As commands are placed traditionally under File item of the menu bar. Here we must say that you will work with two kinds of files. During design process you will create and use the file with .fla format. It may be relatively large in size. To display the movie you will create compiled file with .swf extension (sometimes called “swift”) which encapsulate and zip all the data and processing and is smaller in size.

To save all changes in the design file you need to choose Save or Save As from the Menu-File.

To compile the “display-ready” file you need to click Publish from Menu-File. We will discuss the publishing procedure later in details. For now we will say that Publish by default creates also an HTML file where Flash movie is embedded, ready for Internet use.

When your Flash design environment is opened, click Save As (place your file in the separate folder where you will keep all examples), give it the name (for example lesson1.fla) and save it. After that click Publish menu item. In Windows explorer or through My Computer Icon open the folder you saved the file and observe results. You should have three files there – lesson1.fla , lesson1.swf and lesson1.html Open swf and html files - you will see white screen – but it’s OK, since you didn’t put any content there.

You may find additional help using Menu – Help – … and various tutorials, content-related help and dictionary, which are supplied with the Flash MX bundle.

In the following modules we will show main elements of the Flash design environment.

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