Hour 14. Making Buttons for the User to Click

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• How to create simple buttons

• How to create multistate buttons that include a down state and an over state

• How to create buttons with advanced features such as animated states and sound effects

• How to control what area on a button is clickable

• How to create invisible buttons

Now that you've learned how to create basic drawings and simple animations in Flash, we can move on to what's possibly the most compelling attribute of Flash: interactivity. A plain linear animation can be quite powerful on its own. When you add interactivity, though, the users are engaged. They become part of the movie. In this hour, and the next two, you'll learn how to add interactivity to movies.

The most straightforward way to add interactivity is by adding buttons. This way, users can click buttons when they feel like interacting maybe they want to stop and start an animation at will. Or maybe you would like them to be able to skip ahead past an introduction animation.

Flash makes it easy to create very sophisticated buttons using any shape. In addition, it's easy to add visual enhancements, including animation and sound effects. This hour you'll learn how to create the visual elements of buttons. Then, in Hours 15, "Using ActionScript and Behaviors to Create Nonlinear Movies," and 16, "Using ActionScript for Advanced Interactivty," you'll start making the buttons do things.

By the Way: Button States

Button states are simply the different visual versions of a button as a user interacts. For example, all the dialog boxes that appear in Flash contain an OK button. That button has a down state what it looks like when a user clicks it that is slightly different (visually) from the normal up state for the button. The buttons that you create in Flash can also have a down state. Actually, you can also easily create an over state, which is the visual look of the button while the user puts his cursor over it. For example, all the buttons in the Tools panel in Flash have an over state that looks like a raised box. You'll learn to create this kind of effect in this hour.