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A crash course in Flash
After the arrival of Flash 4, a Macromedia product for animated and dynamic web applications, a new era started in the history of web development as general users were quite fed up of the same old static look.
Previous versions of flash couldn’t get enough attention from developers because of minimal flexibility, complicated software use and limited features. Flash 4 successfully removed these problems and developing total flashbased became easy.
Flash is useful because users with basic knowledge of the software can start building interactive flash presentations, animated gifs and websites. Its “action script” language, made on the lines of java script in Flash 4 was of special interest to professional developers, since it could perform almost all the necessary functions a professional interactive site should have.
Finally Flash MX 2004 (version 7) has been launched, through which one can now develop interactive flash applications for hand-held devices. Simply select a suitable template from the gallery and it will resize your screen area and optimize your published swf. Having said that, let’s begin with this tutorial that promises to make Flash all the more easier (note: a basic knowledge of flash is required in this tutorial).
Beginning: Let’s make a flash presentation in Flash MX 2004 with the help of templates. Click on “New” in the File Menu and then click on “Slide Presentations” in the Categories area under the Templates tab. From Templates area, choose any template that you like.
A basic presentation with a few ready-made slides is ready to be edited. This presentation has a background, editable text and charts and buttons for moving between slides.
With this template, you can:
1. Add slides.
2. Remove slides.
3. Change the order of slides.
4. Change background.
5. Edit text.
6. Edit charts.
Adding slides: Right-click on the slide after which you want to add another slide and click on “Insert Screen.” Alternatively, you can also press “+” sign at the top of the tree representation of slides.You can also copy a slide if you want the newly-added slide to have the same content. For this, simply right-click on the slide you need to copy and paste it after the slide you want your new slide to be added.
Removing slides: Just right-click on the slide and press “Delete Screen”or just press “-” sign at the top.
Changing order: Drag the slide to the position where you want.
Changing background: Click on the top-most slide named “presentation” and select its background. Delete it and the color will change to orange. Select and delete again to change it to purple. If you want to add a customized background, go to Files and click “Import > Import to Stage…” to select the background file you want to place. Resize the imported image to the size of the screen using “Free Transform Tool (Q).” Once you change the background, it will be changed in the whole presentation thus saving you from extra work.
Editing text: Double-click at any place on the text given in any of part the slide and edit it. For example click on “title” and then double-click the text “My Company” to add your company name.
Editing charts: You can edit the available charts according to your desire or insert your own charts from other chart-making tools, such as Excel simply by copying from that tool pasting it in your flash presentation.
You are ready: After you are done designing your presentation save your work. Publish it in “Windows Projector (.exe)”’ format. For this purpose go to File menu and click on publish settings. Check only the Windows Projector checkbox and uncheck all the others. Press Publish. Double-click on the generated Flash.exe file to see your presentation. Press Ctrl+F to switch to full-screen mode. If you want to switch to full-screen automatically, just add this line of code in the in the Actions (F9) area after selecting the top most keyframe in the timeline. fscommand (“fullscreen”, true).
What more you can do now? You can add your self-made animations such as an animated map, a dynamic graph or a 3D demo of any gadget. Once you are familiar with it, you can do just about anything. The sky’s the limit so happy animating.
The writer
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