What Makes Flash a Special Web-Design Tool?

Flash's early claim to fame was its ability to deliver vector images over the Web. What's the advantage of using vector graphics? Vectors keep file sizes down, and they're scaleable: This means you can maintain control of what a Web site looks like when your viewer resizes the browser window, for example, making the whole thing stay in proportion as the window grows or shrinks.

Another advantage that Flash provides is progressive download capability. Progressive download allows some elements of a Web site to display immediately upon download while more information continues to arrive over the Internet. Both the use of vector images and the use of progressive download enhance the viewer's experience.

Other facets of Flash's appeal include its ability to create original artwork with both Bzier and natural-style drawing tools; its ability to handle imported artwork, sound, and video; and its ability to assist designers and developers in creating animation and interactivity. Over time, Macromedia has enhanced Flash's tools for creating interactivity. Now, Flash contains a full-fledged object-oriented scripting language. ActionScript 2.0 is compliant with the ECMA-262 specification, making it much more like JavaScript. ActionScript 2.0 supports inheritance, strong typing, and the event model.

How Flash Animates

Flash uses standard animation techniques to create the illusion of movement. You create a series of still images, each slightly different from the next . By displaying the images rapidly , one after another, you simulate continuous movement. Flash's animation tools help you create, organize, and synchronize the animation of multiple graphic elements, sounds, and video clips.

Flash File Formats

Flash is both an authoring environment for creating content and a playback system for making that content viewable on a local computer or in a Web browser. You create artwork, animation, and interactivity in Flash-format files. These files have the extension .fla and are often referred to as FLAs . To make that content viewable on the Web, you convert the FLA files to Flash Player format; Flash Player files have the extension .swf. Another name for the playable format is SWF (pronounced swif ).

How Flash Delivers

Flash's publishing feature creates the necessary HTML code to display your Flash content in a Web browser. You can also choose alternate methods of delivering Flash contentas animated GIF images, for example, or as a QuickTime movie. Flash creates those alternate files during the publishing process.

About Flash Player

In Flash's early days, the need to use a player to view Flash content was considered a drawback to creating Web content with Flash. Designers feared that users would be reluctant to spend time downloading another helper application for their browsers. But Flash has become the de facto standard for delivering Web rich-media contentespecially interactive vector art and animation on the Weband Flash Player is now widely distributed. Macromedia estimates that more than 97 percent of machines that are being used to access the Internet already have some version of Flash Player installed.

Flash 8: What's New?

Although Macromedia uses the names Basic and Professional to distinguish the two versions of Flash 8, the division of features may not match everyone's idea of what those words mean. The breakdown of features doesn't directly correlate to the divisions that are often made about who uses Flash: designer versus developer, artist versus programmer, or beginner/ amateur versus experienced /professional. Flash Basic is a tool for creating artistic, interactive Web content, and so is Flash Professional. The Professional version adds features that will be of particular help to those who use Flash to develop Web applications, but the Professional version adds advanced graphics, animation, and video features as well.

The goal of Flash 8 Visual Quickstart Guide is to bring beginning-to-intermediate Flash users quickly up to speed using Flash's design, animation, and basic interactivity tools. Unfortunately, that means we can't spend time on some of Flash's other impressive tools, such as video and complex ActionScripting. Many excellent resources can help you learn more about Flash's advanced features once you've finished this book.

The following headings highlight some of the new features of Flash 8.

What Is Progressive Downloading?

Most viewers lack the patience to wait for an entire site to download, especially one that includes big bitmaps, sounds, or video. Flash breaks the content of your Web site into chunks that can be sent over the Internet a little bit at a time. Progressive download (which is also sometimes referred to as streaming in Flash) means that once some of the art of your site has downloaded, Flash can display it while the rest of your data continues to download. As Flash plays the first pieces of your movie, subsequent pieces keep coming into your viewer's computer, and Flash feeds them out at the specified rate. If you plan your movie right, the images coming in never catch up to the images being displayed, and your viewer sees only a continuous flow of images.

Interface Improvements

Pasteboard

Flash's authoring environment contains the Stage , where you place the artwork that appears in your final Flash creation, and the Pasteboard (formerly called the work area ), a storage area surrounding the Stage. The Pasteboard gives you more storage space for objects that need to stay behind the scenes than the work area used to. The Pasteboard grows to meet your needs. If you place graphic elements that are larger than the current Pasteboard, Flash increases the size of the Pasteboard to accommodate them.

Tabbed documents for Mac users

The Windows operating system has always allowed Flash users to view multiple open documents as tabs in a single window. Flash 8 gives Mac users the same capability. By default, multiple open documents appear as tabs in one window. You can see the documents in separate windows by changing Preferences settings.

Tabbed panels for everyone

In previous versions, Flash grouped panels vertically, which takes up a lot of room on the desktop and leads users to repeatedly collapse and expand panel windows. Flash 8 adds the ability to group multiple panels as tabs in a single window ( Figure i.2 ).

Figure i.2. Flash 8 offers tabbed panel groups. To view a different panel, click its name .

Multiple libraries in one panel

In previous versions, each active Flash document had a separate Library panel. In Flash 8, by default, the Library panel contains the libraries of all open documents; as you switch documents, the active document's library appears in the panel. To view another document's library, choose it from a menu in the Library panel ( Figure i.3 ). You can pin the library currently on display so it doesn't change when you switch documents; you can also open libraries in separate windows.

Figure i.3. The Library panel in Flash 8 contains information for all the Flash documents currently open. To view the contents of a different library, choose it from the menu of open documents.

Object-level undo

Flash 8's history-tracking feature gives you a choice of techniques for undoing your work. Flash can track each step you take in a document in sequence, and you can undo those steps in reverse order. Alternatively, Flash can track the steps used in creating symbols separately from the other steps you take. That way, you can undo changes to one symbol without undoing changes you made to another symbol or to the document as a whole.

Script Assist mode

In Script Assist mode, Flash 8's Actions panel provides text fields, menus , radio buttons , and check boxes that help you enter ActionScript code in the correct syntax ( Figure i.4 ).

Figure i.4. Assisted scripting returns in Flash 8. The Script Assist mode of the Actions panel helps you to enter scripts. You make choices and enter text in the Script Assist window; Flash writes the ActionScript code using the correct syntax.

Design-Tool Enhancements

Object Drawing mode

Flash's natural-style drawing tools create shapes that interact with one another. For anyone used to using other graphics tools, such as Macromedia FreeHand or Adobe Illustrator, that's a confusing concept. Flash 8's Object Drawing mode enables you to draw shapes that don't interact unless you command them to.

Gradients

Flash 8's gradients can display up to 15 colors. You control how a gradient fills an object when you resize the gradient ( Figure i.5 ). You can modify the location of a radial gradient's focal point. You can now use gradients in strokes as well as in fills.

Figure i.5. When you resize a gradient so that it's smaller than the object it's filling, you control the way the gradient fills the gap by choosing an overflow method from the menu in the Color Mixer panel.

Flash Type

Flash 8 uses a new text-rendering engine that improves the readability of text, especially text at small sizes. Flash Type renders text in both the authoring environment and in Flash Player. Users of Flash Professional 8 can customize the way Flash Type antialiases their text.

9-slice scaling

Flash's default scaling can distort graphic-objects when you resize them; the distortion is particularly noticeable at the corners of the resized objects. Flash 8 offers a technique for improving the looks of scaled movie-clip symbols. By enabling a movie-clip symbol's 9-slice scaling guides, you can define corner regions that don't change when the symbol scales . The result is a consistent look among different- sized copies of the same symbol ( Figure i.6 ).

Figure i.6. When you edit a movie-clip symbol that has 9-slice scaling enabled, guidelines appear within the symbol. The draggable guides define the corners of the object. The corner sections don't scale when you resize the object.

Bitmap caching

When a button or movie-clip symbol contains complex vector graphics, animating the symbol can bog down the playback of your movie. That's true even if the symbol just moves around the Stage without changing its content. Runtime bitmap caching improves playback performance by taking a bitmap "snapshot" of such a symbol and moving the bitmap around the Stage pixel by pixel. Bitmap caching avoids the need to recalculate complex vectors for the symbol in each new position.

Filters and blend modes (Professional only)

Flash Professional 8 provides two ways to create special effects for objects. Filters can be applied to text boxes and movie-clip and button symbols to create such effects as glows , drop shadows, or blurs. Blends can be applied only to movie-clip symbols. Flash's blend modes work similarly to those found in Macromedia FireWorks and Adobe Photoshop, allowing you to composite images and control the interaction of colors among overlapping objects.

Custom easing (Professional only)

Flash's easing controls have always helped make animations appear more natural by letting you control the rate of change in a tweened animation sequence. Custom easing gives you more precise control, allowing you to set different rates of change for different properties (for example, changing an object's position quickly, but changing its color slowly). You can also vary the rate of change over time: for example, starting the change slowly, speeding up in the middle of the animation sequence, and then slowing down at the end.

Video enhancements (Professional only)

Flash Professional 8 offers several new video features:

On2 VP6 is a new codec (compressor/decompressor) for creating Flash Player 8 content. On2 VP6 improves Flash's ability to balance file size and quality for video that you include in your Flash movies.
Flash 8 Vide Encoder is a stand-alone video encoder that can handle batch processing of video files.
Flash 8 Professional supports alpha channels. You can use alpha channels to create transparency effects: for example, compositing video animation and cartoon animation (often called blue- or green-screen work).
Flash 8 Professional supports embedded cue points for synchronizing video and Flash animation.