Several of the operations, like masking, motion guides, creating buttons and mini-animations, called movie clips, are usually done within three or four steps for your most primitive of jobs. With the added bonus of being able to easily use files from other Adobe products within your Flash document, 2D animation in Flash has never been so much fun! Now with the CS3 line, almost any file type can be imported in, arranged, modified, and integrated to your liking from one application to another. Take for instance, Photoshop to Flash. Now, you can set-up all your layers with their appropriate text, photos, and vector shapes within Photoshop just the way you like it. Then pop over to Flash and open the PSD file directly into the program. While still keeping the layer order, Flash gives you the chance to designate how each layer/object will be treated within the Flash environment before going in. No more painstaking import of individual elements which you had to arduously rearrange with the intended composition. This is a much lauded change from the majority of us web developers that have used Flash in conjunction to Photoshop for the last few years.
Depth of Options
Most anything on the web today that has some kind of interaction in it can be recreated in Flash. User interfaces, banners, films, and even small video games can all be produced or showcased using Flash. A lot of the more complex creations are leveraged using Flash’s proprietary programming language called Actionscript. Now, for those of you familiar with coding or scripting, Actionscript is very similar to Javascript and uses a lot of the same operations to do the same interactive jobs. The difference lies in that Actionscript has access to all the elements of Flash as well as being able to create its own operations and routines to work with them. This brings a whole new level of interactivity to the end user that make all the aforementioned creations possible. And now with the newest version of Actionscipt released in FlashCS3, more innovations are in-store.
With Actionscript 3.0, Flash promises to: have better playback performance and optimization; adhere to the up-and-coming ECMAScript as well as reflecting its coding model more precisely; allow for the inclusion of XML to be used in Flash applications; and, finally, allow access to deeper components in the Flash program. This may not make a whole lot of sense to the layman, so basically all this means is that web developers that are familiar with coding in languages like Javascipt will have no problem writing code for Flash as well as building programs that can send and receive data from the server using the very popular markup language XML. The difference between using Actionscript 3.0 as opposed to 2.0 means a bit longer code, but better performance. Thankfully though, you still have the option of using the latter for the simpler jobs that you may do.
But what if you want to break into coding, but you just don’t know where to begin. Well, another new feature that should get both graphic users of Flash as well as the coders excited is the ability to copy any hand animated segment and paste the information as Actioncript. Say you have an object slide across the screen and enlarge and you want see the equivalent animation in actionscript. Well, just do the operation once on the stage as you would normally do, select all the frames of animation on that layer, right-click and Copy Motion as Actionscript 3.0, create a blank layer, and paste the script in the Actions panel. Now you can actually see what’s going on, so that if you wanted to modify it by code, you have easy access to the information. Oh, and if you notice the Copy Motion menu above the Copy Motion as Actionscript 3.0, well, that new addition makes it so that you can copy all those frames like you did previously and apply it to any other symbol you may have. This can come in handy for quick animation that different symbols will be mirroring.
