How to Use This Book | Macromedia Flash 8 for Windows & Macintosh

Like all Visual QuickStart Guides, this book seeks to take you out of the passive reading mode and help you get started working in the program. The tasks in the book teach you to use Flash's features. The book is suitable for beginners who are just starting to use Flash and for intermediate-level Flash designers. The initial chapters cover the basics of creating graphic elements by using Flash's unique set of drawing tools. Next, you learn how to turn graphic elements into animations. After that, you learn to create basic user-interface elements, such as rollover buttons. To make your content interactive, you'll work with the Actions panel in Script Assist mode and the Behaviors panel to create basic ActionScript. There's also information about importing and working with various non-Flash content: artwork from other applications and sounds. Finally, you learn to use Flash's Publish feature to create HTML for putting your Flash creations on the Web.

The tasks in the chapters that follow can be carried out in either Flash Basic 8 or Flash Professional 8; in general, the tasks rely on features that are found in both versions, with additional notes where Flash Professional adds other tools.

What You Should Already Know

In order to get you started quickly, this book makes a few assumptions:

Flash Basic 8 or Flash Professional 8 is already installed on your computer.
You're familiar with the workings of your operating system.
You can carry out basic tasks, such as opening, closing, and saving documents; opening, closing, resizing, collapsing, and expanding document windows and dialogs; using hierarchical menus, pop-up menus, radio buttons, and check boxes; and carrying out standard application commands such as copy, cut, paste, delete, and undo.

Cross-Platform Issues

Macromedia designed Flash's authoring environment to haveas much as possiblethe same interface on the Macintosh that it has on the Windows platform. Still, differences exist where the user interfaces of the platforms diverge. When these differences are substantial, this book describes the procedures for both platforms. Illustrations of dialog boxes come from both platforms, but generally, there is no special indication as to which platform is shown. If a given feature differs greatly between platforms, the variations are illustrated. If a feature is available only on one platform, that is noted in the text.

Originally, Macintosh computers required Macintosh keyboards, and some key names were unique to that keyboard: for example, Return (instead of Enter) and Delete (instead of Backspace). This book generally uses Enter and Delete for these two key names.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Most of Flash's menu-based commands have a keyboard equivalent. That equivalent appears in the menu next to the command name. When this book first introduces a command, it also describes the keyboard shortcut. In subsequent mentions of the command, however, the keyboard shortcut usually is omitted. You'll find a complete list of these commands on Peachpit Press's companion Web site for this book, http://www.peachpit.com/vqs/flash8/.

Contextual Menus

Both the Macintosh and Windows platforms offer contextual menus. To access one of these contextual menus, Control-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) an element in the Flash movie. You'll see a menu of commands that are appropriate for working with that element. For the most part, these commands duplicate commands in the main menu; therefore, this book doesn't generally note them as alternatives for the commands described in the book. The book does point out when using the contextual menu is particularly handy or when a contextual menu contains a command that is unavailable from the main menu bar.

The Artwork

The Flash graphics in this book are simple and easy to draw. In most cases, the examples are based on simple geometric shapes, which means you can spend your time seeing the Flash features in action instead of re-creating fancy artwork. To make it even easier for you to follow along, Flash files containing the graphic elements that you need for each task are available on Peachpit Press's companion Web site for this book, http://www.peachpit.com/vqs/flash8/.