Chapter 13. Basic Interactivity

13. Basic Interactivity

Macromedia Flash 8 isn't just a tool for creating animated cartoons or blinking ad banners. You can use Flash to create complex, interactive Websites for e-learning, e-commerce, and other internet applications. To make your Flash content interactive, you need to add scripts to your Flash documents. Flash includes a complete scripting language, ActionScript, for developing interactivity. Scripting and the ActionScript language are both complex topics, and teaching them is beyond the scope of this book. However, Flash provides two tools that can help inexperienced scripters: The Actions panel's Script Assist mode helps you to input ActionScript code accurately, and the Behaviors panel generates scripts for common interactivity tasks. In this chapter, you'll use these tools to create very basic scripts. This is just a taste of scripting to get you started thinking about the ways you might use interactivity in your Flash creations.