Introduction; About Flash; About Flash Player - MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-USING FLASH Use Manual

Introduction

Welcome to Macromedia Flash Basic 8 and Macromedia Flash Professional 8. Flash provides
everything you need to create and deliver rich web content and powerful applications.
Whether you're designing motion graphics or building data-driven applications, Flash has the
tools to produce great results and deliver the best user experience across multiple platforms
and devices.
This guide is designed to introduce you to Flash. The tutorial in this guide leads you through
the process of creating a simple Flash application.
This chapter contains the following sections:

About Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

About Flash Player . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

What's new in Flash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
About Flash
Flash is an authoring tool that lets you create anything from a simple animation to a complex,
interactive web application such as an online store. You can make your Flash applications
media rich by adding pictures, sound, and video. Flash includes many features that make it
powerful but easy to use, such as drag-and-drop user interface components, built-in behaviors
that add ActionScript to your document, and special effects that you can add to objects.
When you author in Flash you work in a Flash document, a file that, when saved, has the file
extension .fla. When you are ready to deploy your Flash content, you publish it, creating a file
with the extension .swf. Flash Player, described in the next section, runs the SWF file.
About Flash Player
Macromedia Flash Player 8, which runs the applications that you create, is installed by default
when you install Flash. Flash Player ensures that all Flash SWF files are viewable and available
consistently and across the broadest range of platforms, browsers, and devices.
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