Macromedia Flash 8: Training from the Source

Lesson 6. Adding Basic Interactivity

For the Tech Bookstore, so far you added text, used symbols, made animations, and built your own graphics. You displayed all this in Timelines. These days, all of these things together will earn a big fat whoopdy-do from the millions of users using the web every day. Why? Because they want your web application to do something. Displaying graphics and animations and text is all very fine and good, but if end users can't interact with it in some way, it really doesn't merit their sticking around on the site or even coming back. Let's leave the boring old display of information to posters and museum curators and add a little interactivity to your work.

Interactivity is added to the Tech Bookstore Website.

In this lesson, you'll take the big leap and start making things interact with your users. Before you get all sweaty with panic, thinking that you'll have to write ActionScript fresh-outta-your-head, take a deep breath, go to your happy place, and rest assured that in this unit you won't have to think too heavily with your left brain. You'll use behaviors that come with Flash to add ActionScript and you will use Script Assist to do some tasks that behaviors don't handle. Script Assist will help you ensure that the ActionScript you're adding is well-constructed without forcing you to learn everything there is to know about this very powerful, not-at-all scary scripting language. Feeling better? Good, let's get started then.