• The Library panel is where Flash displays a list of the media elements in your Flash document.
• ActionScript code allows you to add interactivity to the media elements in your document. For example, you can add code that causes a button to display a new image when the user clicks it. You can also use ActionScript to add logic to your applications. Logic enables your application to behave in different ways depending on the user’s actions or other conditions. Flash includes two versions of ActionScript, each suited to an author’s specific needs. For more information about writing ActionScript, see Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Flash in the Help panel.

Flash includes many features that make it powerful but easy to use, such as prebuilt drag-and-drop user interface components, built-in behaviors that let you easily add ActionScript to your document, and special effects that you can add to media objects

When you have finished authoring your Flash document, you publish it using the File > Publish command. This creates a compressed version of your file with the extension .swf (SWF). You can then use Flash Player to play the SWF file in a web browser or as a stand-alone application. For an introduction to Flash Player, see “About Flash Player” on page 17.

What you can do with Flash

With the wide array of features in Flash, you can create many types of applications. The following are some examples of the kinds of applications Flash can generate:

• Animations These include banner ads, online greeting cards, cartoons, and so on. Many other types of Flash applications include animation elements as well.


• Games Many games are built with Flash. Games usually combine the animation capabilities of Flash with the logic capabilities of ActionScript.


• User interfaces Many website designers use Flash to design user interfaces. The interfaces include simple navigation bars as well as much more complex interfaces. You can find an example of a navigation bar created with Flash across the top of the www.macromedia.com home page.


• Flexible messaging areas These are areas in web pages that designers use for displaying information that may change over time. A flexible messaging area (FMA) on a restaurant website might display information about each day’s menu specials. You can find an example of an FMA on the www.macromedia.com home page. The tutorial in “Tutorial: Building Your First Flash Application” on page 95 guides you through the process of building an FMA.


• Rich Internet applications These include a wide spectrum of applications that provide a rich user interface for displaying and manipulating remotely stored data over the Internet. A rich Internet application could be a calendar application, a price-finding application, a shopping catalog, an education and testing application, or any other application that presents remote data with a graphically rich interface.