Flash CS4 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Adding Buttons to a Flash Project

In This Chapter

• Creating buttons

• Creating animated buttons

• Using the Button Library

• Bringing buttons to life with ActionScript

Buttons. You click them and something happens. The Web is full of buttons that link to all manner of interesting content. You can create buttons in Flash too. You can create buttons that do interesting things, buttons that do stuff but aren't seen, and buttons that move when you pause the cursor over them. You can create interesting buttons in a flash in Flash. But the buttons don't do a darn thing except display different graphics until you add ActionScript to them. In this chapter, we show you how to create a button, use the button library, and make a button functional with ActionScript.

Creating Buttons

Buttons have timelines, and they also have states. When you create a button, you work with a four-frame timeline — one frame for each state. You can create a simple button with one state or a cool button with four states. When you put a graphic in a state, something different happens in each one, depending on user input. The states are New York, New — just kidding. This list describes what the graphic in each state's frame does:

• Up: What the user sees when the frame on which the button resides is first displayed.

• Over: What a user sees when the cursor pauses over a button.

• Down: What a user sees when clicking the button. ...