Text Boxes

Movie Clips

Posted April 2, 2002

Flash MX was released on March 15, 2002. Go to the Macromedia site at http://www.macromedia.com/flash for more information and to download the free Flash 6 player.

Also see Flash MX Tutorials on this site.

Posted February 12, 2002

These Flash 5 tutorials assume that the reader is familiar with some of the basic operations of the Flash 5 interface and has used the Object Actions panel in the Normal mode to create ActionScript button event handlers and frame actions. If you have just started to work with Flash 5, there are several good, beginning to intermediate level books available. I found Macromedia Flash 5! - Creative Web Animation by Derek Franklin and Brooks Patton, Macromedia Press, 2001 to be one of the better ones. Once you have chewed over its contents for a while then ActionScript - The Definitive Guide by Colin Moock, O'Reilly & Associates, 2001 is a good next step.

Of course there is a very active Flash community on the web. If you go to www.google.com and type in any ActionScript expression enclosed in quotation marks you will immediately find hundreds of sites. For example I typed in "onClipEvent(enterFrame)" and within 0.12 seconds got a listing of 1570 web pages containing that entry.

So why am I adding another set of tutorials? First, the tutorials on this web site are intended to help students, teachers, instructional programmers, and instructional designers use Flash to create instructional materials, not to create commercial web sites. Second, there are some topics in Flash that are not discussed as fully as they should be if one is to understand what is going on as a Flash movie, containing multiple event handlers, plays. Third, as anyone who has taught knows, to really learn a subject, teach it.

If you have comments or suggestions on these tutorials, contact me at webmaster@minddrops.com