Flash CS3: The Missing Manual

Publishing Your Animations

Publishing your animation is Flash shorthand for "using the editable .fla file you work with in Flash to generate a noneditable file your audience can play."

The kind of noneditable file Flash produces depends on how you decide to publish your animation. Your choices include:

• A compiled Flash file (.swf). Flash Players, including the Flash Player plug-in that comes with most browsers, play .swf files. If you plan to include your Flash animation in a hand-coded HTML file (or to import it into a Web site creation program such as Adobe Dreamweaver), you want this option.

  POWER USERS' CLINIC: Preloading

  If you drop in on Flash user groups, you may hear talk of preloading, which is a strategy related to optimization. Preloading means that you use a frame-based script (Chapter 10) to download as much of your animation as you can before you actually need it. For example, to keep your audience entertained—in other words, to keep them from getting so bored waiting for your animation to download that they surf away in frustration—you might want to display a quick-to-download scene and loop it a few times while your real, byte-intensive animation quietly downloads in the background.

  The ActionScript required to create your own preloader script is beyond the scope of this book, but Flash Help has details. Simply choose Help → Flash Help and search for "about loading and working with external media." (See Appendix A for more tips on using Flash Help.)

• A Web page (.html, ...