Chapter 1. The Flash Authoring Tool

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Before you get started drawing and creating animations in Macromedia Flash MX, it's helpful to take a look around the authoring environment and begin to recognize and manipulate its components . When you open Flash, you enter the Flash authoring environment, and Flash creates a new blank document. Each document consists of three basic items: a Timeline, a record of every frame, layer, and scene that make up your movie; a Stage, the actual area in which your movie displays; and a work area, a space that surrounds the stage during authoring but doesn't appear in the final, published movie. In addition, Flash offers various panels, libraries, and tools that help you accomplish your work.

What does the Flash authoring environment look like? And how do you access tools and different views? This chapter presents a quick tour of the elements you see when you open a Flash document. Subsequent chapters explain in more detail what is what as you really get into using each element.

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