Hour 17. Using Components

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• How to use the user interface components that ship with Flash

• How to populate components with customized data

• How to make components trigger your own ActionScript

Last hour you studied programming. For some, it was probably more technical than you'd prefer; for others, it wasn't technical enough. This split is natural. Some people like to express their creativity by solving puzzles, whereas others like more artistic endeavors. One of the great things about Flash is that it can appeal to both types of people and components are a great example of this fact.

A component is a version of a movie clip that has programming code encapsulated in it so that a nontechnical person can use it without having to know how it works. Anyone can use a component. Depending on the features built in to the component, it can do some pretty fancy stuff.

This hour you'll mainly learn how to use components. First, though, it's important to get one concept straight: You use components while authoring Flash, but someone had to create them. It's not as simple to say the developer and the user anymore because there's another developer who created the component to begin with. I often refer to the using developer, meaning the person who's using the component while authoring her Flash file (not to be confused with the developer who created the component).