Chapter 1: Getting Started; About Flash - MACROMEDIA FLASH MX 2004-GETTING STARTED WITH FLASH Getting Started

CHAPTER 1
Getting Started
Welcome to Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004. 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 necessary 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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
About Flash Player . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
What's new in Flash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Guide to instructional media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Using the Start page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

About Flash

Flash is an authoring tool that allows you to 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.
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