This flash for beginner aims to arm flash designer or flash developer wannabe with basic knowledge to flash authoring tool. Flash authoring tool or flash authoring environment is a window or stage where designer or developer will spend most of his/her time there.
A flash document consists of a Timeline, a Stage, a Work Area and Panel. In figure below, we show the >Timeline, the Stage and the Work area.
Flash Timeline
Flash timeline consists of Scene, Frame and Layers. Scene, like the name suggested, is like an episode of a story. Each flash application can consist of several scenes or just one scene. We may use scene to make different page for our flash website such as "about us", "Contact Us" "Feedback" etc. Basically, each flash scene represents specific setting of our flash application.
In a scene, flash frame represents an instance of the flash movie at that point of time. We use flash frame to simulate the animation or to impose a script (actionscript) to the movie at that particular frame. In an analogy term, we may consider a scene as a chapter in a book and frame as a page in the book.
In each flash movie, different objects may stack on one another. The transparent stacking sheet in flash is called layers. We store different objects on different flash layers. For example, we store background images of our flash webpage on the lowest layer, script on the top layer and the rest of other objects in between the two layers.
Flash Stage
Flash stage is a where our animation and objects should be. This is a visible area to users. By default, flash makes the stage size to default at 550 by 400 pixels. If we would like to have a larger area for our flash application, we may change the default size of the flash stage on the properties inspector.
Flash Work Area
This area is invisible to users (flash website viewers). We use this work area to hold temporary objects for later used.
Flash panel
Besides the three components make up the flash document, we have >flash panels. Most often used flash panels are Toolbox panel, Actions panel, Properties Inspector Panel and Color Mixer Panel. These panels assist us to create flash application with ease. For example, we can change flash stage size in properties inspector, color of an object in toolbox panel and create a gradient color object using color mixer. All in all, these flash panels form an integrated flash development environment.
This concludes our flash for beginners serie on flash authoring tool.
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