Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional Bible

Chapter 19. Making Your First Flash CS4 Project

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating a Main Timeline layout

• Adding navigation elements to a presentation

• Using the TextArea component

• Creating an effect with a custom BlurFader component

• Adding accessibility information to movie elements

Now that you've learned the basic principles behind Flash actions, you probably want to start creating a presentation to put on a Web site. This chapter integrates several basic production principles and teaches you how to make a simple interactive Flash movie that has basic navigation and text functionality. After you have completed this chapter's lessons, you'll be more prepared for the nitty gritty of ActionScript in Part VII of the book.

Note

In this edition of the Flash Bible, we've updated all examples with interactivity to use ActionScript 3.0, which is compatible with Flash Player 9 or later. If you need to create projects with legacy versions of ActionScript (1.0 or 2.0), refer to previous editions of the Flash Bible (Wiley).

The Main Timeline as the Site Layout

Before you can start creating a Flash project, you need to know what you're communicating — what is the basic concept of the experience? Is this an all-Flash Web site? Is this a Flash animation that introduces some other type of HTML-based content? For the purposes of this chapter, you create a Flash movie for a basic all-Flash presentation. In a sense, this project is the Flash equivalent of a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Let's look at the completed ...