The Built-In Components
Choose Window→Components, and you see a panel full of built-in components that you can drag and drop into your Flash document. Well, it's almost that easy. You see different components depending on whether your document is based in ActionScript 2.0 or ActionScript 3.0. Like any ActionScript code, you can't mix version 2 components and version 3 components in the same document. This forwardlooking chapter focuses on the ActionScript 3.0 components. The ActionScript 3.0 built-in components fall into three main categories:
Flex components. Flex is a programming tool that, like Flash Professional, creates applications using ActionScript and SWF files. Also, like Flash, Flex programs can make use of prebuilt components, which are saved in SWC files.
User Interface components. Similar to HTML components, Flash User Interface components include buttons, checkboxes, lists, text fields, and windows—everything you need to create a Flash form and collect data from your audience.
Video components. These components give you tools to work with video clips. For example, they work with streaming video (where a movie begins to play before the entire file is downloaded). These components are an indication of Flash's growing role as a tool to provide web-based video.
Note
This chapter focuses on the User Interface components, because they're by far the most popular Flash components. For an introduction to the video components, see Part three.
User Interface Components
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