Learn How to Navigate the Stage Area in Macromedia Flash 8
Tags:adobe acrobat,adobe illustrator,adobe indesign cs2,adobe pagemaker,adobe photoshop,cmyk,control palette,object styles,rgb,total training
Grab video code:
Transcript
Okay, so we are ready to start up the application, if you just started the application for the first time, you probably looking at the screen just like this. We got a nice flash screen with some options about how to get started for our projects.
Over on recent items here, we will have any projects you have been working on. So, you can quickly get right back to them. Over a new, we can see we got all kinds different documents that you can bring up.
Now, this is a good point for me to mention that we are using flash professional software for this. And if you are using the flash standard software, you probably only be seeing the flash document up there at the top.
If that is the case, I would actually recommend that you go ahead and download the trial software for Mac Media’s website. They will let you use it for 30 days, and that should give you plenty of time to complete the courses on this disc, and also evaluate if you want to upgrade the software yourself or not.
We can even start from templates and these are all included with the file when you first purchase it. We have got all kinds of different template files. A lot of them are just simply different sizes, but we can also pick up some ones that has some programming or some other things already setup in them to get you start it on things.
Presentations have some backgrounds and some sample text, and even some navigational elements in them as well. So, those are great to take a look at when you got a chance to.
Now, just to get things started so we have something on the screen. I would like to open up a file that should be in your Lesson 2 folder if you copy those two at desktop, and I am going to bring this one up called flash lash. This will just give us something to look at on the screen, and we can see all of our tools spring to life here.
We have got a pretty standard setting with our tool kit on the side here. We have also got a lot of panels around the outside, but I want to focus attention first on the center area, which is really our stage. That is where we are going to see everything happen, be able to preview our project, work on our elements; all those types of things.
Just to make sure that we can move around in this environment. I want to take a look at some other controls. One very important one up on the top here in this pull down panel is going to be just some simple sizing controls. This will allow us to scale out and take a look at our presentation. It allows us to zoom in very close.
Let me also as a companion to that introduce some tools over in our tool pallet on the side. We have got a hand tool and we have got a zoom tool.
Now, I think everybody pretty much knows how to use a zoom tool. If we click, we are going to zoom in on areas. We can Alt or Option click with this tool to zoom out and you can also use it as a drag option tool if you want it to drag around the specific area to be able to zoom on it and see your elements up close when you work on them so, basic zoom tool operation.
Now, while I am talking about magnifying things, keyboard shortcuts for this which is generally what I use instead of grabbing that magnifying glass tool would be Ctrl Minus (-) for zooming out and Ctrl Plus (+) for zooming in. On the Macintosh of course, that would be Command Minus (-) for zooming out and Command Plus (+) for zooming in.
Now in addition to this tool, you can see when you zoom in, you may want to be working on another part of your document, that is what our hand tool is for. So, we switch off to the hands will here. As I grab the hand tool, I can just click and drag and move my presentation over. So if I zoom out a little bit, you will notice that I basically with this tool can move around the whole area.
This also has a great keyboard shortcut and again, I use it more than grabbing that hand tool itself. Let me just switch tools back of to some other tools like for instance the selection tool up in here. To keep our shortcut for using the hand tool would be the Spacebar. You hold the Spacebar down, you can grab. When you let go of the Spacebar,
Comments