Advanced Flash
Introduction
Hello, and welcome to our Advanced Flash course. This course will cover some of the advanced techniques that some of the best Flash wizards in the world like to employ. It will also cover the ActionScript programming language that makes Flash movies so much more than simple animations with limited interactivity.
Conventions Used in this Course
You may see some words or phrases looking a little different than the surrounding content. Here is a quick key to some of their meanings.
If a word has a title attribute, many browsers will display extra content when you hover your mouse over the word (you don't need to click on it, just hover your mouse over it). It usually takes a second or two and then the content will show up. See the examples below and test how your browser displays each one.
- Text you need to type at the keyboard looks like this: Ctrl + L
- If you need to use a specific filename, it will look like this: follow_ball.fla
- Things that need to be highlighted will look like this: Remember the terminating semi-colon
- Code is sometimes shown similar (but not exactly) to how it might appear
in the Actions panel. Certain words are coloured differently to make them
stand out.
- _root.gotoAndStop('section one');
- gotoAndStop(1);
The Course Layout
- Lecture notes
- Each topic is explained in a series of lecture notes. These pages (usually from 5 to 15 pages per topic) explain the content you need to learn with examples to help you get a feel for the topic that is being discussed.
- Links
- The links section should be explored for an hour or so after all the lecture notes have been read in a topic module. This page has links to resources on the Web related to the topic you have just learned. Some of the pages you may want to bookmark and visit later, while others you may enjoy exploring right away.
- Questions
- There is a page with questions for each lecture topic. You should be able to answer the first set of review questions correctly just from what you have learned in the lecture notes. Write each question and answer out, and then check back with the lecture notes after to verify the answers that are given on the answer page in case you made any mistakes or are not sure on the results of your work.
The bonus questions are not required, but are presented to challenge the more adventurous students who wish to push themselves a little further. The answers to these questions may sometimes be found in the resources listed in the links page or other resources. They may require extra effort to answer.
If there are exercises, they should be completed after the questions have been answered and verified with the lecture notes.
- Quiz
- This should be the last stage before moving on to the next topic. If you do not get at least 80% on the quizzes, you should go back and review the material before proceeding to the next topic. These quizzes will help determine if you are understanding the current topic well enough to move on.
Each time you load the page, a different set of questions may load from the question pool. Since only a subset of questions are loaded each time you do the quiz, you have to do the quizzes several times to see all of the questions. This will help with memorisation of terms while keeping things (hopefully) interesting.
Requirements
Hardware
While Flash movies are usually optimized to be usable on a wide variety of computers, the Flash authoring program is less forgiving. The content in this course is, for the most part, compatible with either Flash 5, or Flash MX (Flash MX is recommended). While the Flash program itself is not particularly RAM intensive for today's computers, the interface itself has a lot of panels. In light of this, the larger your monitor and screen resolution, the easier it will be to work with the Flash interface. Another option is to use multiple monitors. This would allow you to keep your panels on one screen, and your work area on the other. However, Flash can still effectively be used on any size monitor as you have the ability to quickly move panels around, or collapse them.
Software
Obviously, the Flash 5 or Flash MX program is necessary to do this course. A free trial version of Flash MX is available from the Macromedia Web site. Of course, you can buy or upgrade the program there as well.
You must have at least Flash 5 installed to take the course. Flash 4 or earlier versions will not be able to use the actionscript or techniques that are outlined in this course. These earlier versions of Flash also use an earlier version of ActionScript that is not the same as the version in version 5 and MX. Most of the techniques and scripts in the course will work in Flash 5 or MX. The Flash program works fairly consistently across different platforms, so whether you are using a Macintosh computer or a Windows computer will not matter too much.
Take your time and enjoy yourself! You are about to enter a whole new world of advanced Flash!
Advanced Flash - TOC - [ Introduction ] - Books -
Conventions - Layout - Requirements -
