Flash Explained

In this easy Flash 8 tutorial, I will show you how easy it is to make an attractive and effective promo button. You will learn the following design techniques during the process of making this button:

• How to make a nested animation – one that continually moves inside the button symbol itself,
• How to use the blending filters in Flash 8 professional to give your button more depth and a more realistic look,
• How to implement a mask to create scrolling text visible only in certain areas of the button and more.

Below is the actual example of the promo button that you are going to create in this tutorial.

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In this tutorial, you will see how easy it is to create an internal preloader for your Flash site, complete with:

• A graphical loading bar,
• An animated text field showing the percentage of your Flash movie loaded so far and,
• A dynamic text field showing the amount of bytes loaded and total bytes.

Moreover, you are going to learn:

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The trace() method is your best friend in ActionScript. In this tutorial, I will show you how to use it so that you can check the values of variables, the number of iterations in a loop and the flow of a conditional statement. You will also learn what are comments in ActionScript and how to use them. Dive in!

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In this lesson, I will show you how to create a background for your Flash document using no design tools at all! Besides being far more easy to change then a drawn graphic, this background created with ActionScript will adapt itself automatically to any size your movie may have. But more on that later.

The examples below show what you’re going to achieve at the end of this tutorial.

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In this tutorial you will learn to create an interface that will enable your users to change the looks of your flash site with a simple mouse click.

This makes for a more appealing and interesting site. Also, if a user has any preferences over colors used in your site, or finds it easier to read text at a different size or color, you will enable him to do exactly that, thanks to some simple ActionScript code.

Look at the example below – try clicking the three buttons in the top right corner and see what happens. Slick, huh?

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This tutorial shows how you the way to design and code an old-style analog clock which shows the correct time.

In a previous tutorial, I showed you how to make an analog clock using ActionScript only. This time, there will be much less coding involved, and a lot more design.

Below is an example of what you can achieve by following my tutorial. You will be doing this in Flash 8, but you’ll have the source code for Flash MX (that is, if you are targeting Flash player 6 when publishing your .swf) available too.

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In this lesson, you will learn how to manipulate a movie clip via button symbols. You will create an interface and write ActionScript that will enable the rotation and movement of a movie clip across the screen.

Press and hold the buttons on the example below to see the little rocket spaceship move and rotate!

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I will show you how to make a preloader that acts as the cursor on the screen.

As you can see in the example below, the preloader moves and acts as the substitute of your mouse. This example is a document with small dimensions. However, what you will learn in this lesson can be applied to any flash document.

Of course, the user has to move the mouse over the flash area on the page in order to see the effect.

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In this easy tutorial made for Flash MX, Flash MX 2004 or Flash 8, you will learn to create a shiny animated effect which will appear once a user rolls his mouse over a button. Many visitors to my site have asked me to explain how to make this kind of effect once they have seen it in my tutorial in which I explain how to make a tabbed website menu in Flash. To all of you who have requested this – here it is! In particular, you will see how to:

• Make a button shape using the drawing tools in Flash,
• Turn the shape into a movie clip,
• Add more design layers inside the movie clip to create a button that looks more real,
• Use the linear gradient to create the shiny effect,
• Animate the effect via the frame-by-frame animation and
• Implement some simple ActionScript code to make the effect work.

You can see an example of what you are going to learn in this detailed lesson below. Move your mouse over the button to see the glittery shining rollover effect!

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Before starting, please note that this is a tutorial made for Flash 8 Professional. Some effects, like drop shadow and other blending fx, are not available in previous versions of Flash.

While making this button, you will learn to:

• Make a nice colored gradient effect,
• Create a button label with some modifications,
• Apply a drop shadow effect to the label to give it more depth,
• Create masks so that the button looks more compact,
• Make a rollover state with animation inside it,
• tips and tricks related to Flash design and much, much more.

You can see the final result that you’re going to achieve at the end of this tutorial below. Roll your mouse over the buttons and click on them to see how nice they behave.

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