Flash 8 Cookbook

12.9. Building an Image Slideshow Using the Flash 8 Cookbook Components

Problem

You want to build a slideshow that uses a Flash 8 Cookbook component.

Solution

Use a Presentation component to create a slideshow based on images you import into Flash during authoring time.

Use a SlideShow component to create a slideshow based on external image files that are loaded at runtime.

Discussion

You can use the Presentation component that is discussed in previous recipes in this chapter to create a photo slideshow. To do so, follow the same directions as when creating a standard presentation, using imported images as the contents for each screen. If you want the slideshow to play back automatically without the user having to press buttons, you can set the Presentation component instance’s timer parameter to a positive numeric value indicating the number of seconds between each image.

The SlideShow component provides slightly different way to create a slideshow. Instead of having to import your images, arrange then in Flash, and so on, you can actually tell Flash to load the images as the movie runs. In order to understand the information, the component needs you to provide the information about the images in an XML document. Even if you’ve not used XML before, it is still very simple to learn and apply to this task. The following is an example of an XML document that will work with the SlideShow component to create a slideshow with four images:

 <images> <image url="one.jpg /> <image url="two.jpg" ...