Flash: A time based programming language

Although the basis of this whole series is
really about programming basics, we're not
going to dig too deep into Flash's interface in this series.
It's really important to know where we are
because in the end,
it's just important to know where we are, and
we don't want to work in a vacuum.
For that we're just gonna really touch
briefly over a few kind of critical things
that you just have to know about Flash
before you could actually
build a flash application.
Flash is a time based
programming language.
Its history was really a timeline and it
evolved into a programming language, and it's
now so much more than just a timeline.
Let me just open up again, and we're in CS5,
but it really doesn't matter which version we're in.
And we open up
our new FLA file.  We'll see that
we have our timeline.  If we can't find it, we
could always go through our window again and
search for our timeline and find it.
Now, we're not going to focus too much, well we're
not going to focus at all on the timeline in
our programming currently.
The one thing that we do want to know
is understand that there is a timeline.
And what is that timeline?  Flash by default
is going to run a certain amount of frames
per second that we could change those settings.
We're gonna see how to do that
as we look into the publish settings,
but right now we're talking about just an overview
over
some items that we're not really going to dig
too deep into.
So we could see that our
current frame, rate if you look right here,
you'll see that our current frame rate is
is twenty four frames per second,
which means that Flash is going to try to run
that application,
well run the frames, twenty four times a second.
This is our line
that goes through the times.  Right now we're in frame one.
Our application could have had many frames,
and if we were focusing on animation,
or we were timeline animators, we would just create our application
and drawings online,
well, on here, not online, but on this frame,
on these keys and build our application.  But we're
not really focused on that.  We need to
understand that that exists and we're going to look at
that
in videos that their topics are not related
to basic programming.  But it's important to
know that Flash runs on a timeline.
Our application will always have a stage.
So our scene itself is main view.
This is our application right now, so if I run it,
(and don't worry about how I'm running it right
now, because we're gonna see that in the next video)
if I run the application, you're going to see
that right now our application has nothing, it's
running nothing,
there's nothing in it,
it's just a blank white screen.
Our default name is
"untitled-a" because we never saved
the file, so nothing is new here.
What else can we do?
We have our tools and again,if you can't find
the tools, just go to your window, search for tools,
and then you got your tools.
There's so many tools that are really
just down to creating visual things directly on the stage.
Just to prepare us for the next video, I'm
going to create a rectangle, by grabbing the rectangle tool.
If I wanted to, I could've changed the color.
Very simple things here that are
kind of intuitive, so play around with it.
Although, there's very very cool things you
could do with it.
It's very intuitive and I recommend,
instead of us making videos going
over every single feature,
playing around with those tools because those
tools are so basic that if you know how to
play around the computer
you could very easily figure out what
most of them do.  But we're going to get into
those generalities of the things of how
to use those tools
in future videos which are not
this theme that we're in right now.
So we have our tools panel.
Right now you'll see that my mouse is currently
in this weird x-position which basically
means that we could draw our boxes right now.
We always want to be on our arrow when we're
not...
So a way to do that is
just click on our selection tool,
or click on v,
and v would take us back into being in our
tool.
Now another kind of cool thing to talk about
is,
as we're talking about these basic things that we
need to know about Flash,
is if you hover over one of
your tools, you're gonna see the shortcut
that's related to it.  So for example, the free
transform tool, it's shortcut is q.  So if I would be right here,
I could always click on q,
and it would change into the free transform, so
I can now just select whatever I want to select
and freely transform them and change their
size.
It's a kind of cool way to figure out
shortcuts to these stuff.
My only shortcut that I really remember from the
tools is v to get back to my regular selection
which is usually what I need.
Okay, the next thing we want to talk about
now that we've got just like this basic of, we
know there's tools there, we know that we have our stage,
if I run my application right now, we're gonna see that
our application has
content within it, because we just drew that
content directly onto the stage.
The next thing that we wanted to talk about
is really just down to
knowing how to find
things that you need.
And that's kind of vague, but basically anything that's
visual most times, is
part of your layout that's part of the tools
you would find in your window.
Okay, things that are connected to running your
application in testing mode, or running your
application while you're inside of your editor,
you'd find in your control.
We're going to skip debug for now because
it's not in our topic but things that are obviously
related to debugging you would find
in the debug menu.
The commands are really not-
we're not going to get into it right now because
there are ways to create
custom commands which we're not going to
dig into in basic coding.
So these menus are quite
intuitive.
There are some that are a bit, maybe a bit
harder to figure out like-what is modify?
Modify, as the name implies, is changing
things, but things I guess that we could not
visualize directly on the stage,
which are mainly things that are connected to
different types of objects,
our timeline, and so on.
Or in general,
our document itself,
which we're going to look into
when we start talking about the publish settings,
or more accurately when we start talking about
our properties panel, which they're all kind of
intertwined and mixed together.  There are so many
ways of doing the same things.
So, instead of me going over every single feature
here,
if you're completely new to Flash what I would
recommend is, after this
intro video course is done,
just take an hour or two and just play around
with the menus and options and just see what
are the things inside.  You don't have to
understand everything but just try to
get an overview of things to get a little
bit more comfortable in the environment.
The last battle that I want to talk about
before we end this kind of overall arching,
these are kinda random stuff that you could do inside
of the application,
is I wanted to talk really quickly about our
window>actions panel.
If we go into window>actions,
is basically where traditionally,
ActionScript developers would put all their
syntax, all their code, into.
We're going to see how to work with this, but it's
not our recommended way of working within
Flash and working with programming in
Flash.
We're going to see into that
momentarily, but it's a panel that you need to
know that exists.