I can remember the day as clear is if it were just yesterday. I was walking by my boss's office late one winter afternoon at the college where I teach, and he called me into his office. Sitting on his desk was a thin white box with some sort of weird swirl on it. He slid the box across to me and asked, "You know anything about Flash?"
To be honest, as a Director user, what I knew was filtered through the eyes of a Director guy, which meant I didn't know much and what I did know convinced me it was a wind-up toy compared to Director. I replied, "A bit." The boss leaned back in his chair and said, "Well, learn a lot more because you are teaching it in four weeks." This was the start of one of the longest, strangest, and most exhilarating trips I have ever been on. The version was Flash 3, and I have been using and teaching Flash ever since.
What I didn't expect is to be writing books, articles, and tutorials around Flash for the past 10 years. I also didn't expect that my fascination with Flash would take me around the world speaking at conferences or lecturing at universities from Amsterdam to Wu Han on the subject of Flash and web-based media. It has been quite the experience, and Flash CS5 makes things even more fascinating.
Flash CS5 is one of the more important versions in the history of the product. Flash CS5 has evolved into a serious design tool able to handle everything from simple motion graphics to broadcast-quality animations. It also marks the point where Flash is fully integrated into the Adobe product line up. The Motion Editor, a rejigged Media Encoder, the TextLayoutFramework, and a fist full of sophisticated animation tools are evidence of that.
This book is also a bit different from any Flash book you may have read or considered purchasing. From the very start of the process, we put ourselves in your shoes and asked a simple question: "What do you need to know and why?" This question led us into territory that we didn't quite expect. As we were grappling with that question early in the process, we kept bothering our network of Flash friends to be sure we were on the right track. At some point, both of us simultaneously came to the conclusion, "Why not just let them explain it in their own words?" This is why, as you journey through this book, you will encounter various experts in the field telling you why they do things and offering you insights into what they have learned. The odd thing is, at some point in their careers, they were no different from you.
One other aspect of this book that we feel is important is we had a lot of fun developing the examples and exercises in the book. The fun aspect is important because, if learning is fun, what you learn will be retained. Anybody can show you how to apply the new Springs feature to a rectangle on the Flash stage. It is more effective when you do exactly the same thing to bend trees. Anybody can dryly explain 9-slice scaling, but it becomes less techie when you apply it to a Chinese olive seller. Nested movie clips are a "yawner" at best, but, when they are related to a Hostess Twinkie, the concept becomes understandable. Shared libraries are an important subject. Instead of filling a library with circles and text, the concept becomes relevant when the library is populated with "Bunny Bits." Interested in going out on the bleeding edge of Flash and preparing a project for an Android-based device? Whack-A-Bunny makes it interesting and fun.
As you may have guessed, we continue to exhibit a sense of joy and wonder with Flash, and we hope a little bit of our enthusiasm rubs off on you as well.
To start, this is not a typical Foundation book. There is no common project that runs throughout the book. Instead, each chapter contains a number of exercises to help you develop some "Flash chops," and then we turn you loose in the "Your turn" section of each chapter.
We start by dropping you right into the application and creating a small Flash movie located in a "butterfly garden" (told you we were having fun). This chapter familiarizes you with the Flash workspace and the fundamentals of using Flash Professional CS5. Chapter 2 introduces you to working with the graphic tools and with graphics files and finishes with your creating a banner ad for an ice hotel.
Chapter 3 introduces you to symbols and libraries in Flash CS3. In this chapter, you learn how to create and use symbols, and we even let an olive seller explain how 9-slice scaling works. With those fundamentals under your belt, we show you how to share symbols and libraries between movies and how to manipulate symbols with filters and blend effects, and along the way you travel from a park bench in Paris to a wall in Adobe's San Jose headquarters, discovering how to create some rather powerful effects in your Flash movies. The chapter finishes by showing you how to use masks to your advantage in Flash.
At this point in the book, you have pretty well mastered the fundamentals. The rest of the book builds upon what you have learned. Chapter 4 picks you up and throws you into the ActionScript 3.0 pool. Chapter 5 starts by explaining how to use audio in Flash and finishes with your constructing an MP3 player. Chapter 6 reinforces the message that "text isn't the gray stuff that surrounds your animations." We show you how it is both serious and fun by stepping through how to create scrolling text and how to use the TextLayoutFramework to bring professional-level typography into your work.
Chapter 7 is one of the more important chapters in the book because Flash's roots were as an animation application. You are going to learn the basics here, but don't expect to be shoving boxes and circles around. You will be banging hammers, eating apples, dropping rabbits, fixing a neon sign and lighting it up, and setting a butterfly in motion. Did we mention we believe in having fun? Chapter 8 continues the motion theme by getting you deep into the new Motion Editor, and Chapter 9 walks you through the 3D tools introduced in Flash CS4 and improved upon in Flash CS5.
From animation, we move into video in Flash. In Chapter 10, we show the entire process from encoding to upload. In fact, the chapter finishes with your adding captions and a full-screen capability to a Superman movie. Along the way, you will visit heaven and meet a "Girl with Stories in Her Hair."
Chapters 11, 12, and 13 give you the chance to play with all of the Flash user interface components, actually style a Flash movie using Cascading Style Sheets, and explore how XML gives you a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to adding dynamic data to your movie.
Chapter 14 is where you get to pull it all together and build everything from a simple preloader to a fullbore game designed to be played on an Android device.
The final chapter focuses on the end game of the design process. It shows you a number of the important techniques you need to know that will keep your movies small and efficient, how to create the SWF that will be embedded into a web page, and how to keep that process as smooth as possible.
Finally, Tiago and I are no different from you. We are learning about this application and what it can and cannot do at the same time as you. Though we may be coming at it from a slightly more advanced level, there is a lot about this application we're still learning. If there is something we have missed or something you don't quite understand, by all means contact us. We'll be sure to add it to the book's site.
Our final words of advice for you are these:
The amount of fun you can have with this application should be illegal. We'll see you in jail!
To keep this book as clear and easy to follow as possible, the following text conventions are used throughout.
Important words or concepts are normally highlighted on the first appearance in bold type.
Code is presented in fixed-width font.
New or changed code is normally presented in bold fixed-width font.
Pseudocode and variable input are written in italic ixed-width font.
Menu commands are written in the form Menu
Where we want to draw your attention to something, we've highlighted it like this:
Note
Ahem, don't saw we didn't warn you.
Sometimes code won't fit on a single line in a book. Where this happens, we use an arrow like this:
This is a very, very long section of code that should be written allon the same line without a break