Adobe Flash Professional CS6 Adobe Flash Professional CS6 Classroom In A Book | Page 215

getting Started
To begin, view the interactive restaurant guide that you’ll create as you learn to
make interactive projects in Flash.
1 Double-click the 06End.html file in the Lesson06/06End folder to play
the animation.
The project is an interactive restaurant guide for an imaginary city. Viewers
can click any button to see more information about a particular restaurant.
In this lesson, you’ll create interactive buttons and structure the Timeline
properly. You’ll learn to write ActionScript to provide instructions for what
each button will do.
2 Close the 06End.html file.
P Note: Flash warns
you if your computer
doesn’t have the same
fonts contained in a FLA
file. Choose substitute
fonts, or simply click Use
Default to have Flash
automatically make the
substitutions.
3 Double-click the 06Start.fla file in the Lesson06/06Start folder to open the initial
project file in Flash. The file includes several assets already in the Library panel,
and the Stage has already been sized properly.
4 Choose File > Save As. Name the file 06_workingcopy.fla and save it in the
06Start folder. Saving a working copy ensures that the original start file will be
available if you want to start over.
about interactive Movies
Interactive movies change based on the viewer’s actions. For example, when the
viewer clicks a button, a different graphic with more information is displayed.
Interactivity can be simple, such as a button click, or it can be complex, receiving
inputs from a variety of sources, such as the movements of the mouse, keystrokes
from the keyboard, or even data from databases.
In Flash, you use ActionScript to achieve most interactivity. ActionScript provides
the instructions that tell each button what to do when the user clicks one of them.
In this lesson, you’ll learn to create a nonlinear navigation—one in which the movie
doesn’t have to play straight from the beginning to the end. ActionScript can tell
the Flash playhead to jump around and go to different frames of the Timeline based
on which button the user clicks. Different frames on the Timeline contain different
content. The user doesn’t actually know that the playhead is jumping around the
Timeline; the user just sees (or hears) different content appear as the buttons are
clicked on the Stage.
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Lesson 6
Creating Interactive navigation