Unit 1.  Introduction to FLASH 8 (I)

What is FLASH?

Flash 8 is a powerful tool created by Macromedia that has overcome the best expectations of its creators.

Macromedia Flash was originally created in an effort to realize colorful animations for the web as well as to create animated GIFs.

Designers, web professionals and amateurs have selected Flash 8 by many reasons. Further we will see why Flash 8 is interesting.

Why should I use FLASH 8?

The possibilities of Flash are extraordinary, each new version has outstripped the previous one, and the present Flash 8 is not an exception. Although its common usage is to create animations (during this tutorial we will see how easy it is) it has far more applications. They are so numerous that all web designers should learn how to use Flash.

Flash has been made up in order to fix the great lack in the Internet: that is, Dynamism. This dynamism does not imply only animations but rather interactive animations, which allow users to see the web as something attractive, not static (unlike most of the pages that are made by the use of the HTML language). With Flash we can easily and quickly create animations of all types.

It is easy to learn how to handle Flash, it has a friendly environment that invites us to sit down and spend hours making whatever our imagination suggests, but that is not sufficient to be preferred by professional designers. Then what is it?

From Flash MX 2004 to Flash 8

There are companies that improve their products just by the economic necessity. When it happens, users promptly notice this by the few improvements in the newer version. That is not the case of Flash 8, which continues considerably improving the new versions of its products following the Macromedia tradition.

If we thought that Flash 8 MX was already insuperable, do not miss the improvements that Flash 8 provides. These improvements consist in: easy handling, higher graphic potency and integration with programs of image edition, in having ability to import video, possibility to emulate your mobile devices video oriented, and for the begginers, the ActionScript wizard has come back. Let us analyze these advantages in more details:

Attractive Designs: Flash 8 allows the using of visual effects that will ease the creation of animations, presentations and forms more attractive and professional. Moreover, it supplies a new set of tools that will help you doing this easily and faster, such us filters and blend modes, added in this version.

Font Optimization: It also includes some readability options for small sized fonts, what makes our texts more comfortable to read. Also you can edit this optimization, allowing you to select the configuration preestablished for dynamic and static texts.

Consolidated Libraries: Now you can search any object existent in our movies faster, browsing our open libraries from a single panel.

More powerful animation: Flash 8 allows much more control of the interpolations setting a new edition mode form which you will edit the velocity the rotation, shape, color and movement are applied.

More powerful graphics: Avoid the unnecessary representation of vectorial objects setting an object as a bitmap. Although the object is converted to a bitmap, the vectorial data remains the same, so, in every moment, you can convert it again to a vectorial object.

Improvements in video importing: To ease the working with video formats, Flash 8 provides high-quality new independent codec, completely skinnable.

Metadata Compatibility: Include your SWF files in searching engines defining a title, description and/or keywords.

Mobile devices Emulator: Preview your Flash Lite compatible mobile devices movies oriented with the new emulator Flash 8 includes.

ActionScript Wizard: The ActionScript Wizard has come cack. Was deprecated in the last version, but now it has been retrieved and improved. Now ActionScript is at your reach.

Flash 8 brings many novelties