[Prince77]

Flash and Flaunt it !!!

Scenario:
You have just learned HTML. You are making web-pages in HTML but are not satisfied because HTML is “static” doesn’t let you use your creative mind to the max.. You want to add snappy interactivity and animations to your Web pages, but don't want to create huge "click-here-and-take-a-break" files? Take a look around people coz’ FLASH has arrived to answer your problems.

Flash has already grabbed everyone's attention as the hot thing in web animation, and it promises to be an increasingly serious tool in web development. So, what I am going to do is tell you a bit about Flash and the things it can do.

Let us delve a bit into history to see how things were before the advent of Flash. Before the introduction of Flash 4.0, you had to use a separate application in order to create the HTML code necessary to deliver functioning Flash movies for the Web. This application was called Aftershock and it generated all the code needed. With the introduction of Flash 4.0, Aftershock is no longer needed as the inserting of the appropriate code is done natively in Flash. This is somewhat of a challenge for designers and developers, especially if they are unfamiliar with Flash or do not use the application.

Flash movies are interactive graphics and animation for web sites. Web designers use Flash to create navigation bars, animated logos, animations with synchronized sound and even complete inter-active web sites. Flash movies are compact due to the use of vector graphics, so they download rapidly and scale to the viewer's screen size.

Flash offers exciting new features for creating immerse, lush interactive web sites. New playback features include MP3 audio, text fields for placing user-editable text in a movie, and enhancements to Flash actions that let you create sophisticated games, forms and polls. New authoring features include a streamlined publishing process, a redesigned library and an enhanced graphical interface.

Now let us see how it works. As you work in Flash, you create a movie by drawing or importing images, arranging it on the stage, and animating it with the Timeline. You make the movie interactive by making it respond to events and to change in specified ways. When the movie is complete, you export it as a Flash Player movie, embed it within an HTML page, and transfer it and the HTML page to a web server. So, if it seems too hard to digest in one go, rest easy because this series of articles will help you make a beginning in Flash.

Flash developers are already doing lots of cool stuff with Flash, but you have to do a little digging to get started. Well, here is a good place to break ground...

– Ankur