Section 1.5. The Timeline


1.5. The Timeline

For a complex piece of software, Flash is based on a surprisingly simple principle the old-fashioned slideshow. In case you're too young to remember, a slideshow consisted of a stack of slides loaded into a tray, a projector that displayed one slide at a time, and a human to run the show, determining the order in which the slides appear and how long each stays on screen. Well, a Flash animation is really nothing more than a souped-up slideshow. In Flash, the picture-containing slides are called frames , and instead of a person controlling the slide projector, you've got the Timeline .

The Timeline (see Figure 1-17) is what determines what order your frames appear in and how long each frame stays onstage. If you've decided to organize the images on your frames into separate layers (described in Chapter 3), the Timeline is also where you specify how you want your layers stacked : which layer you want on top, which one beneath that, and so on.

In addition to letting you put together a basic, plain- vanilla , frames-run- left-to-right , layers-run-bottom-to-top animation, the Timeline also lets you create spiffy effects, such as looping a section of your animation over and over again and creating tasteful fades.


Tip: The first time you run Flash, the Timeline appears automatically. But if you don't see it, you can display it by selecting Window Timeline or pressing Ctrl+Alt+T.

In the rest of this chapter, you get to take Flash out for a test drive. You'll learn how to open , play, and save Flash animations; see the Timeline in action; and try your hand at two of the program's most important panels of allthe Tools panel and the Property Inspector.


Note: This book doesn't cover the less-used Filters, Parameters, Project, Screens, Strings, or WebServices panels.



Flash 8
Flash Fox and Bono Bear (Chimps) (Chimps Series)
ISBN: 1901737438
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 126
Authors: Tessa Moore

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