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.

Free Ebook Computer Programming : Macromedia Flash MX : Getting Started with Flash.pdf

New features available in both Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX

Professional 2004

The new features in Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional 2004 provide greater productivity, enhanced rich media support, and streamlined publishing.

Productivity Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional 2004 include many features designed specifically for streamlining previously complex tasks, thereby improving productivity: Timeline effects You can apply Timeline effects to any object on the Stage to quickly add transitions and animations such as fade-ins, fly-ins, blurs, and spins. For more information, see "Using Timeline effects" in Using Flash.

Behaviors With behaviors, you can add interactivity to Flash content without writing a line of code.........more

For example, you can use behaviors to include functionality that links to a website, loads sounds and graphics, controls playback of embedded videos, plays movie clips, and triggers data sources. For more information, see "Controlling instances with behaviors" in Using Flash.

Accessibility support in the authoring environment Accessibility support in the Flash authoring environment provides keyboard shortcuts for navigating and for using interface controls, letting you work with these interface elements without using the mouse. For more information, see "Accessibility in the Flash authoring environment" in Using Flash.

Updated templates Flash includes updated templates for creating presentations, e-learning applications, advertisements, mobile device applications, and other commonly used types of Flash documents. For more informations, see "Using templates" in Using Flash.

Integrated Help system The new Help panel provides in-context reference, ActionScript reference, and lessons in the Flash authoring environment. For more information, see "Using the Help panel" in Using Flash.

Spell checker The spell checker searches your text for spelling errors. For more information, see "Checking spelling" in Using Flash.

Document tabs Tabs for each open document are displayed at the top of the workspace so that you can quickly locate and switch between open documents. For more information, see "Using document tabs for multiple documents (Windows only)" in Using Flash.

Start page The Start page puts commonly used tasks at your fingertips, in a central page. For more information, see "Using the Start page" on page 13.

Find and Replace The Find and Replace feature locates and replaces a text string, a font, a color, a symbol, a sound file, a video file, or an imported bitmap file. For more information, see "Using Find and Replace" in Using Flash.

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