How to Use This Book

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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 exercises 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 the basics of using ActionScript, sounds, and video to make your movies interactive. Finally, you learn to use Flash's Publish feature to create the HTML that you need to put your Flash movies on the Web.

Cross-Platform Issues

Macromedia designed Flash's authoring environment to have, as much as possible, the same interface on the Macintosh platform (including OS X) as 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 all three platforms. Illustrations of dialog boxes come from all three 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 in Appendix A.

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 does not 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 that 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 the Peachpit Web site http://www.peachpit.com/vqs/flashmx/.

I l @ ve RuBoard