symbols
Flash movies are small because of two elements:
symbols and libraries.
Not only do they reduce the size of Flash movies, they also
reduce workload by allowing us to easily re-use objects (as
instances).
There are three types of symbols:
- Graphic symbols are images you create in
Flash, bitmapped images you import or animations that are tied to the
main timeline of a movie.
- Button symbols have built-in interactive
capabilities (think mouseovers as well as play-stop-skip intro). Button
symbols have four frames in their timeline -- up, over, down, hit
(hotspot). To give the buttons their interactive features, we use
actionscript.
- Movie clips are Flash "movies within a
movie." These are usually small pieces of animation that can be placed
within another movie. Movie clips have a timeline that is independent
of the main timeline.
Naming symbols
Here are some pointers:
- No spaces!
- No special characters!
- No forward slashes
- No dots -- use dashes and underlines
- Begin with a lower case letter to avoid
causing problems with ActionScript.
- Make the names descriptive.
- Consider standardizing ... btn_blueButton
... gfx_triangle ... mov_logo
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