Now in drawing these simple shapes with the tools, we need to bring up one very important point about Flash, and that is, it is a vector based program. And, everything that we will draw with the Flash tool set is going to be a vector object.

Now, Flash can handle bitmap graphics. If I zoom out here a little bit, I have actually got a bitmap graphic over here on the left side of the screen. Let me pan over to that. I will switch over to my selection tool real quick and click. And you can see that this is selecting a little bit differently than the objects that we drew and our property window down here at the bottom shows us that this is a bitmap graphic. We can see how bitmaps behave by zooming in on them. And basically, bitmap graphics are just a set of pixels. So, if I zoom in close on the robot’s head, you can definitely see all these pixels showing up. Now, bitmap graphics are going to be made inside of another program like for instance Photoshop or Fireworks. And, we can even extenuate these pixels by zooming once again. I will just go right into his ear there and you can see all those red pixels stacked next to one another creating the graphic that we are seeing when we zoom back out. I am going to zoom back here again. And in fact, I will just go to 100%. And there, we can see our graphic nice and clean. But we know that those pixels are set up into the bitmap graphic itself.

Now, what I would like to do is try the same thing. I am going to deselect our robot, and this time using our magnified tool, I am going to zoom in on a section of the drawing that we created. What we can see with vector graphics is that we do not have that same pixilated outline. And the reason for that is this: Vectors are really geometry. We are not saving or creating pixels here. The vectors themselves will create pixels as they need. So as we zoom in, it is actually recreating the pixels each time to create a smooth graphic for us.

Now because there is a difference between vectors and bitmap graphics, we are going to need to take a closer look at how we work with and modify these vectors and that includes simply selecting them.

So, let me zoom back to 100% here and let us take a look at the selection tools.