Open up flash 8. My goodness, there's a lot of stuff there. However, you only need to familiarize yourself with a few basic things, before you should be comfortable with your workspace.

In the following screenshot, I have three floating windows open- you need to have the same windows open, now. Press "ctrl-L" to open your Library (F). Press "ctrl-K" to open up the "Align" window (H). Finally, open up your color mixing window by clicking on "Window" at the top of your screen, and selecting "Color mixer" (G)

Here's what's what:

A-TOOLS- There's little beyond the name that you need to know for now. We'll be discussing the tools, in specific, further down the page, and in the next chapter

B-LAYERS- In the course of creating a flash animation, you will occasionally want various visual elements playing on top of one another. To do this, you need to separate your elements into their own layers. This might sound confusing, but you'll grasp it, when we start creating flash.

C- TIMELINE- This is where the basic mechanics of animation (keyframing and tweening) is handled.

D- STAGE- This is where all the action takes place.

E- PROPERTIES- This is where you're going to be "fine-tuning" the various elements of your animation.

F- LIBRARY WINDOW- This is where all of the elements (bitmaps, symbols, video and audio files) of your animation will reside, waiting for you to use them.

G- COLOR MIXER- Where colors and gradients can be fine-tuned.

H- ALIGN WINDOW- this is a tool that you'll be using to scale and arrange visual elements to your stage.

Now, if you're an absolute beginner, spend some time just toying around with these various elements and tools. You need to become comfortable with all of these basic bells and whistles, and while I will be covering them in greater detail in later chapters, it's important that you don't feel intimidated by everything you're seeing here. Push a few buttons, move a few windows around. Get comfortable with the environment...

Now, let's move on to the tools (A.)

Again- the sheer number of tools can look intimidating to the beginner, but keep in mind that we'll be only using about half of these, in the course of creating a simple flash. For the rest of this tutorial, I will be telling you to use the keyboard shortcuts (in parenthesis, above), rather than telling you to select a particular tool from this panel. The purposes of this are twofold:

1: Learning the keyboard shortcuts speeds up your work immeasurably, and it's important that you start using them, from day one.

and

2: It's easier for me to type "Press the V key", rather than "select the 'select arrow' tool from the panel."

The easiest way to see exactly what these tools do, is to mess about with a few vectors....

ON TO CHAPTER 3