The Stage and accompanying work area in Flash Professional are where all of the visual creation, manipulation, and animation take place. This lesson demonstrates the differences between these two features and looks at properties associated with the Stage.
In this chapter, you'll learn the basics of working in Flash Professional CS6 and become familiar with important elements of the application interface.
Becoming Familiar with Flash Professional CS6
The Flash Professional interface contains a variety of useful panels and other structures that help you to work effectively. This lesson provides an overview of the most important and useful elements of the application interface.
Like most Adobe Creative Suite applications, Flash Professional will present you with a Welcome screen when the application is initialized, giving you quick access to a number of common tasks. This lesson looks at the options available in the Welcome screen.
The main menu bar in Flash Professional is full of options and commands that can help you work effectively. This lesson takes a look at the main menu, focusing on commonly used functionality.
The Toolbar in Flash Professional gives you quick access to the essential tools in the application. This lesson will provide an overview of what these are and what they do.
The Stage and accompanying work area in Flash Professional are where all of the visual creation, manipulation, and animation take place. This lesson demonstrates the differences between these two features and looks at properties associated with the Stage.
This chapter looks at the different types of assets that you can use in Flash Professional application, including symbols, filters, and text.
Creating and Manipulating Assets
Flash Professional includes a vast array of tools that you can use to create content for your projects. This lesson demonstrates the use of some of these tools.
Symbols in Flash Professional can be used to package assets and behaviors into small, reusable packages for use across a project. This lesson introduces the Library and looks at how symbols are created.
Once a symbol has been created and stored in a project library, instances of that symbol can be used throughout the project. This lesson looks at symbol instances and how they can be used in Flash Professional.
Filter effects and blend modes can be applied to visual assets to perform blurs, glows, drop shadows, and other effects. This lesson demonstrates the use of these functions.
When you want to display text in Flash Professional, the most straightforward way of doing so is to use the Text tool. This lesson will examine the use of this tool in creating text fields on the Stage.
Flash Professional is used to provide animation for numerous projects for the web, television, and devices. In this chapter, we'll look at the basics of Flash animation.
Animating Assets
Any motion performed in Flash Professional takes advantage of the Timeline. This lesson provides an overview of this feature.
Flash content is animated based on a system of frames and keyframes. In this lesson, we'll explore the basics of frames and how to create and manage keyframes in a project.
Shape tweens, as the name implies, are used in the tweening of basic shape objects. This lesson will examine the unique adjustments you can make across the Timeline when dealing with shapes.
Motion tweens are the most robust method of animating objects in Flash Professional. This lesson will have a look at how to create and manage this type of tween in the Timeline.
Classic tweens are an older form of motion tween that has been renamed in the past few versions of Flash Professional. This lesson will demonstrate the use of classic tweens.
This lesson provides an overview of motion presets and what they can be used for. The Motion Presets panel contains a number of useful presets that can be applied to your projects.
In this chapter you'll learn how to use the programming language ActionScript to enable interactivity in a project. You'll see how use code snippets, write ActionScript directly on the Timeline, and use EnterFrame and Timer events.
Enabling Interactivity
ActionScript is the powerful object-oriented programming language behind any Flash interactive content. This lesson serves as an introduction to working with AS3 in Flash Professional.
The Code Snippets panel in Flash Professional contains an abundance of ready-to-use code aligned to specific tasks. This lesson will demonstrate the use of this feature.
The most direct way to include ActionScript within Flash Professional is to write it directly on the Timeline. This lesson will demonstrate this approach along with the use of the Actions panel.
EnterFrame and Timer events allow ActionScript code to execute independent of any user interaction. In this lesson, you will see how both of these events work in a Flash project.
While Flash Professional traditionally outputs a SWF file for use with the Flash Player, content created in Flash Professional CS6 can also target desktop, mobile, and even HTML5. You'll learn about these output options in this chapter.
Additional Output Options
Adobe AIR is an integrated runtime environment for taking Flash content out of the browser and creating full desktop experiences. This lesson demonstrates how to compile for the AIR runtime.
When targeting mobile devices that run Apple iOS or Google Android, you can employ special builds of Adobe AIR. This lesson demonstrates how to compile for mobile devices.
With the CreateJS Toolkit extension for Flash Professional CS6, you can export animations and basic interactive content that targets HTML5 canvas. This lesson will show you how!
In this chapter, you'll get a quick summary of what has been covered in this course and some final thoughts from the trainer.
Closing Thoughts
In this video we close out the course with an overview of what has been covered and some ideas about where to go next when exploring Flash Professional.