Flash is……….

I wrote my first article in Flash, which is a basic idea of creative design but suddenly I changed my mind and I write this article which introduces the flash Interface little bit. I write this because when I started learning Flash with the help of various tutorials some years ago from websites I spent a lot of time in finding out the interface completely. I know most of you know this well, however this article can help a new Flash user to understand this software basically.

I am going to introduce you the latest version of the flash version, ADOBE FLASH CS3 PROFESSIONAL. If you have Macromedia Flash 8 or Macromedia Flash MX 2004, don’t worry it is almost same.

Timeline

I feel TimeLine is the main part of the Flash where we going to organize our work. This timeline is based on Layers, Frames and Time. In this screenshot there are four layers named “action”, “textbox”, “static text” and “back”. I always welcome a meaning full name for layers. In every layer you can use as many frames as you wish.

Property inspector

This property inspector helps us to customize the common attributes of our selection. The selection could be from stage or from Timeline. In this picture I selected a text field and it shows its common attributes such as font, size, width and height.

Library

In library panel we can store and organize our symbols, bitmaps, videos, sound clips and movie clips. We will use this panel commonly.

Actions panel

We can write our ActionScript code in an object or Frame using this panel. To active this panel we want to select one of this.

Ok. This is enough. These are the only panels we commonly use. There is lot more. Sometimes I will update this when I find some uncomfortable places in my writings.