November 2004
Intermediate to advanced
254 pages
9h 23m
English
Content preview from Flash Out of the BoxBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 8. Buttons and Interactivity
It’s time to get interactive! Animation alone doesn’t enable the user to control anything. The Web isn’t about seeing, it’s about doing. Its real power is in the user’s ability to interact with content to buy and sell merchandise, learn something new, and communicate with people all over the world.
We touched very briefly on interactivity in Chapter 3, in which we let the user restart the animation by clicking on Box Guy. But that is just the beginning. In this chapter, we’ll learn more about making Flash movies interactive through the use of buttons and ActionScript.
The easiest way to add interactivity to Flash is to use a button to run some ActionScript. One button might run a script that opens a web page, while another triggers the loading of a product catalog listing from a database. The ActionScript executed by a button can display help information for the user, add a product to a shopping cart, or send the user to any page in an online catalog. You may be saying, “Big deal. I can do those things with HTML.” True, but buttons can be much more powerful than a link in HTML. Buttons can contain animation and sound, react to rollovers, be activated or dimmed dynamically, or be repositioned automatically when, say, the browser window is resized.
Of course, buttons are just the beginning. There is really no limit to the interactivity you can create with ActionScript, and it can be implemented in a variety of ways. A great example of this is pixeltees ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.