Flash 8 Cookbook

12.2. Building a Presentation Using a Slide Presentation

Problem

You want to use a Flash Slide presentation to display and navigate your content.

Solution

Create a new Slide presentation, add contents to the slides, and export the movie.

Discussion

Slide presentations are part of a Flash Professional–only feature of screens-based development. The idea behind screens-based development is to provide a different interface for creating applications that doesn’t necessarily require the developer to use the timeline. Instead, you get to create a sequence of screens between which the user can navigate. There are two types of screens: Forms and Slides. Forms require you to add ActionScript to make things work; Slides do not. Therefore, for this recipe, Slides are much more applicable. Although you can do much more complex sorts of things with screens, in their simplest sense, they provide a very simple interface for creating presentations.

To get started with a Slide presentation, open a new Flash document by choosing File → New. When the New Document/New From Template dialog box opens, make sure the General tab is selected and then choose Flash Slide Presentation from the list of document types. Click OK, and a new Slide presentation document will open in Flash.

You’ll notice that the interface for a Slide presentation document is different from a standard Flash document. Though the timeline does exist for each screen, it is hidden by default. In addition, a Screen Outline pane appears to the ...