Introduction to Flash

Lately I've been addicted to flash. Its like I feel flash is the answer for everything. My first work-study project was to design a web-site. That's when the craze hit me. I first thought of doing and ASP.net site, but i realized its just a dumb site and there aren't any serverside functions to worry about. All I needed was a nice and flashy look that conveys the message.

Flash to the rescue.

Flash uses vector graphics and it is a very convenient tool for vector based animations. I first thought it might have a lot of support for drawing, but it doesn't. To get graphics into flash, you need to do it through photoshop (my all time favourite). So once you've done drawing something in photoshop just import it to your library or to the stage in Flash (Im using Flash MX, but it really doesn't matter).

In flash layers matter a lot. In fact its a good practice to make use of layers in everything. Both Flash and photoshop. Create distinct parts of whatever it is that you're doing on different layers and name those layers. Definitely helps when you're doin something big.

Once you've got all your images on the stage, its time to tween them and move them and make components out of them. The graphics part in flash is just one half of it. The second half is the actionscripting part. This is a lot like javascript. Also flash is event based - functions are called when an event occurs.

This is my introduction to flash. Also Its good to have dreamweaver 8.0.2 update if you want to use flash with decently in IE. IE has some irritating properties (Click to activate this control thing) and we need to use a bit of javascript to overcome this. The dreamweaver update does this automatically.

Im still a newbie in Flash. And I'll post whatever I learn on this blog. Hope it helps.