Flash 8 Cookbook

12.5. Building a Presentation Using the Flash 8 Cookbook Components

Problem

You want to build a presentation application using the Flash 8 Cookbook components instead of using a template or a Slide presentation.

Solution

Use the Presentation component.

Discussion

The Presentation component that is included with the Flash 8 Cookbook components is specifically designed to allow you to create presentation applications that unite some of the best qualities of the template and the Slide presentation options mentioned in previous recipes. Using the Presentation component, you can quickly and simply put together a basic presentation, but without having to know any ActionScript or advanced Flash techniques. What’s more, the Presentation component allows you to add transition effects without having to rely on a Slide presentation—a Flash Professional–only feature.

The Presentation component is designed to work in one of two ways: either with sequential keyframes on a timeline or with specially named movie clip symbols in the library. The former is, arguably, the simpler of the two techniques, while the latter provides a slightly more robust feature set.

The first way that you can use the Presentation component allows you to set up a presentation in a manner that is almost identical to the template technique discussed in Recipe 12.1. You can set a target for the component, and the component will automatically pause the playback of the target timeline and allow the user to navigate through the frames ...