What Is ActionScript? | Certified Macromedia Flash MX Designer Study Guide

ActionScript is Macromedia Flash MX's robust object-oriented scripting language. You may notice that ActionScript syntax closely resembles that of JavaScript. This is because ActionScript is its sister language. With ActionScript, Flash presentations can take on a whole new life by adding interaction and intrigue for the end user. Without ActionScript, Flash would simply play your presentation frame by frame sequentially at the specified frame rate. With the introduction of ActionScript, you have other options. In other words, if you wanted your Flash presentation to stop at a certain point so that an end user could read text or interact with your presentation, you could use ActionScript to tell your Flash document to do so. If you wanted to redirect the end user to another aspect of your presentation once a certain button was pushed , you would do so with ActionScript. If you wanted only a portion of your presentation to loop for a certain duration while other things loaded in the background, you would need ActionScript. ActionScript empowers your end users, letting them maneuver things that they want to see at any given time. Just like its other nuances , Flash makes basic scripting easy by providing a library of scripts to choose from. These scripts can be found in the Actions panel.

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