Chapter 1: Working With Flash Documents - MACROMEDIA FLASH MX 2004-USING FLASH Use Manual

CHAPTER 1
Working with Flash Documents
When you create and save Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and Macromedia Flash MX Professional
2004 documents within the Flash authoring environment, the documents are in FLA file format.
To display a document in Macromedia Flash Player, you must publish or export the document
as a SWF file.
Note: For information on publishing or exporting a file, see Chapter 15, "Publishing," on page 309 or
Chapter 16, "Exporting," on page 345.
You can add media assets to a Flash document and manage the assets in the library, and you can
use the Movie Explorer to view and organize all the elements in a Flash document. The Undo
and Redo commands, the History panel, and the Commands menu let you automate tasks in
a document.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Creating or opening a document and setting properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Using document tabs for multiple documents (Windows only) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Saving Flash documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
About adding media content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
About creating motion and interactivity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
About components. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Using the library to manage media assets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
About ActionScript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Multiple Timelines and levels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Nested movie clips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Using absolute and relative target paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Working with scenes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Using the Movie Explorer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Using Find and Replace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
11