Lesson #03 The Flash Interface - Part #1
Written By Daniel Mitchell

Flash lets you create movies that allow your audience to interact with. There are various actions that you can allow the audience to do for example jump to different parts of your movie, enter information in forms and move objects are only a few. Below are some of the major interfaces, which you will work with to create your masterpieces.

The Stage and Workplace

The “Stage” is the workplace that you use in Flash. As seen in the picture it is simply a small white square, the grey colored area is referred to as the “off-stage”. The grey area is often used if you want an animation to begin of the stage.

Using the Timeline

The timeline contains the individual frames that make up an animation. It is like viewing a filmstrip laid out on a table so you can follow it frame by frame. Although there's just one main Timeline, you can have several layers held within the Timeline. The major components of the Timeline are layers, frames, and the playhead.

On the left hand side of the timeline are the layers that are listed in a document. Frames contained in each layer appear to the right of the layer name. The frame numbers are at the top under Timeline Header and the playhead shows which frame is currently being displayed on the stage with a red marker.

The red marker can only be in one frame at a time – the frame you are currently editing. At the beginning you will not be able to move the marker as you only have one frame but as you create more you will be able to move it around. At the bottom you will also be able to view selected frame number, the current frame rate, and the elapsed time to the current frame.

Looking at the Layer's panel you will see that the active Layer has a pencil icon to the left of the Layer. Once you lock a layer, you won't be able to affect it at all.

Tools Panel

Whenever you create or edit anything on the stage you will have to select a tool from the tools panel. The panel is broken into several sections: Tools, View, Color and Options and you will no doubt use all of them in the process of creating an animation.

Tools: Primarily used to create graphics and text using the Line and Text tools. The Eraser tool and Paint Bucket tool are used to edit your graphics and you can select your graphics using the Arrow, Subselect and Lasso tool. View: The hand icon is used to pan to other parts of the stage. Simply hold down the spacebar, then click and drag. Using the spacebar to access the Hand tool is useful because it is only active while you hold down the spacebar. As most would already know the magnifying glass is used to zoom in or out of the stage. Color: The Stroke and Fill color tools set the painting attributes of new drawings that you create using the drawing and painting tools. More tools are available from the Color Menu Panel and the Properties Inspecto. Options Depending on the selected tool you may not see anything in this section as it is dedicated to additional modifiers for certain tools.