Macromedia Flash 8

Flash is a drawing and animation package designed to work with vector graphics. It creates animations which can include sounds, music and interactivity, and which are optimised for use on the web. Hence, the files it produces are small and designed for streaming. Furthermore, all the elements which form part of a flash movie are embedded within the movie. This means that, unlike a standard web page which relies on the fonts and resources on the client machine, as long as the user has the flash player installed, the movie will play exactly as you design it.

The default file extension for a Flash file is .fla. Flash movie files can also be published in .htm, .swf, .jpg, .exe, .png or as a projector file.

Layout:

§ Toolbox:

The toolbox contains all tools necessary for drawing, viewing, coloring and modifying your objects. Each tool in the toolbox comes with a specific set of options to modify that tool. The diagram below outlines the grouping of tools.

Arrow tool:

It is used to select a single or a group of objects.

Lasso tool:

It is used to select objects by drawing either freehand or straight-edged selection area.

Text tool (“A”):

It is used to include custom text with various options like selecting a font, colour, style, etc.

Line tool:

It is used to draw a line with options of line width and style.

Oval tool:

It is used to draw an oval object. Ovals can be filled with colours and outlines can be customized.

Rectangle tool:

It is used to draw a rectangular object.

Pencil tool:

The Pencil tool is used to draw lines, shapes or freehand forms. The pencil tool has three modifiers: straighten, smooth and ink. Flash straightens or smoothens the freehand drawing made by this tool.

Brush tool:

The Brush tool allows you to draw brush-like strokes for creating special effects, including calligraphic effects and paintings with an image. The brush tool has the following modifiers: paint options, fill colour, gradient, brush size, brush shape, lock fill.

Paint Bucket tool:

It is used to change the colour of the existing paint and fill empty areas surrounded by lines.

Inkbottle tool:

It allows to stroke lines and shapes with only solid colours but no with no gradients or bitmaps.

Eraser tool:

It erases lines and fills. It can also erase selected items such as only lines or only fills, etc.

Timeline:

The timeline indicates what frame you are at and also indicates the number of frames in your movie. Within the timeline you will find layers - you can have any number of layers within a movie and it is within these layers that you put your graphics, text, and sounds.

Work Area:

The Work Area is not viewable when you play your movie, so it is a place to work on objects or if you want your objects to “fly in” to your movie then start them from the Work Area.

Stage:

The Stage is where all viewable objects lie. Anything on the stage is seen by the user and will be seen in the animation.