Macromedia Flash Tutorial, Continued

Getting Started

Before you start, you may want to take a look at a quick graphical tour of the creation process (it's in the Flash format, so you'll need the plug-in to view it). You can open this tour in a separate window and refer to it as you read.

In creating the Flash Clock, the first step is to create the clock's digits. The clock will make use of a custom font created in Flash and stored as a symbol.

Symbols are the basic building blocks of Flash. Each symbol is a reusable object, a master copy of which is stored in the library. There are three types of symbols in Flash 3: the Graphic, the Button, and the Movie Clip. When a copy of a symbol is placed on the "stage" (which was called the canvas in Flash 2), it is called an Instance. Using symbols can drastically reduce file size; for example, when you place an Instance on the stage, Flash references the master copy in the library instead of storing another full copy.

In our clock, all of the digits will be stored in a single ten-frame graphic symbol named Numbers. This one multi-frame graphic symbol will be the source of the shape information for every number digit. If we want to change the font, we only have to change it in one place. The zero is in frame one, and the numbers one through nine are in frames two through ten.

Our clock's numbers feature a "Stars and Stripes" theme: red stripes with a blue square for the stars in the top left hand corner of each digit. To create these custom numbers, we will first create a Stripes template (so that we don"t have to recreate the stripes each time). Once that is done, we will create each of the numbers.

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