Down free loads mp3

For creating Web pages with splashy graphics, playful noises, and fluid interactivity, Macromedia Flash is hard to beat. Considering that Flash also lets you add entire MP3 sound tracks, full-length cartoons and animations, and sophisticated ActionScript programming to your Web pages, there's little wonder that Flash is one of the most popular authoring tools among both beginners and experts.

If there's one drawback to all this flexibility and power, it is the learning curve. There's a lot to learn with Flash. Fortunately, Flash comes with an excellent tutorial built right into the help menu: Choose Lesson from Help, and run through all eight lessons, if you haven't already. Of course, if you've never tried Flash, you'll want to jump to the Macromedia Flash site and first download the 30-day trial version at www.macromedia.com/software/flash/trial/.

The lessons—which you really should run through (we are going to assume you have)—introduce you to most of Flash's basic commands but don't show you how to make some popular Flash doodads such as banner ads, preloaders, buttons that jump to Web pages, and so forth. And the lessons don't cover some popular ways to set up the Flash work environment. That's where we come in.

Setting Up the Environment

Flash 5 introduced multiple panels for viewing and changing the attributes of items and objects, and at first many inexperienced users find all these tabbed dialog boxes confusing; in fact, so do many experts. A neat trick to simplify your work environment is to combine all of the panels into one "superpanel" (Figure 1). Here's how.

First, widen one panel by clicking and dragging its left or right edge. Next, drag a tab from one of the other panels into the row of tabs in your stretched panel. Release the mouse button, and the tab will migrate to the larger panel. When the last tab from a panel moves, the empty panel shell disappears. Once you've moved all the tabs, save the setup by choosing Save Panel Layout from the Window menu, and enter a name for the new layout. You can switch between the original, multipanel layout and your new one with the Panel Sets command in the Windows menu.

The next GUI change that many Flash users make is the timeline position and selection system. Flash 5 introduced a new way to select and drag frames and groups of frames in the timeline, and most users of older versions can't stand it. To change it, choose Preferences from the Edit menu, and put check marks next to Flash 4 Selection Style and Flash 4 Frame Drawing. The Flash 6 beta reverts to this old method, too. (The new version of Flash, called FlashMX, should be released by the time you read this.)

If you don't have a huge monitor, you can gain some elbowroom in Flash by dragging the entire timeline from the main Flash window to somewhere outside. If you decide to try this, also check the Disable Timeline Docking option in the Preferences dialog box.

Jumping to Web Pages

Lesson 6 of the Flash tutorial explains that you create separate images for the Up, Over, and Down states of an animated button but doesn't really drive home an important point that most folks forget at first: You don't set a button's behavior when you're building its states. Instead, you set the button's action in the main movie after you position the button on the stage. So the process is: Build a button (or choose a prebuilt one from the button library), make a keyframe if necessary, drag the button onto the stage, right-click on the button, and choose Actions to set the button's actions.

The lessons also explain how to make a button jump to another section of the Flash movie, but chances are you'll want a button-click to open another Web page—either on your own site or from another site entirely. Here's how to do it. First, right-click on the button on the stage and choose Actions. From the "+" menu, select Basic Actions, then Get URL; Flash automatically adds the necessary syntax to the code section of the Object Actions dialog box. What you type in the URL field determines what will happen when a user clicks the button. To cause a jump to a local HTML file, simply type the name of the file—index2.html, for example. To cause a jump to another Web site, just enter the complete URL instead, such as http://www.pcmag.com/.

Usually, you'll want the new page to load into the same browser window that the button is in. If this is the case, then you don't need to do anything more. If you want the new page to appear in a new window, however, or if your site uses frames, then there's one more thing to set. To make a new browser window appear, choose _blank from the Window field. If you want the new page to appear in a frame, just type the frame's name into this field, such as _navbar or _content. Obviously, if the site has frames, having a listing of all your frame names helps.

Creating a Banner

Once you have buttons figured out, making standalone banner ads with Flash is much simpler. Essentially, a banner ad is a self-contained Flash movie with a single button—but one that fills the entire movie area, is animated, and usually doesn't change when the mouse cursor is over it. There are quite a few ways to do this, but here's a good method using nested symbols.

Make a new Flash movie (File | New), then select Modify from the Movie menu. In the Movie Properties dialog box, set the dimensions to the size of the finished banner ad. Typical measurements are 468 pixels wide by 60 high for full ads, 230-by-33 for half-size ads, and 120-by-30 for smaller "side-button" ads. Next, make a new symbol (Insert | New Symbol), name it Banner, and give it the Movie Clip behavior. Why Movie Clip instead of Graphic? A movie clip loops indefinitely, just like an animated banner ad.

Next, you'll see an empty stage, waiting for you to create your banner. Create it as you would any other rectangular object (use the rectangle tool), but make it the same size as your movie. (Hint: Draw the banner background with the rectangle tool, then use the tools in the Info panel to size the background exactly to your movie, and use the Align panel to center it relative to the stage.) Also, make the banner object at least 60 frames long or so, with a change in the banner about every 15 frames, but feel free to alter the number of frames used to speed up or slow down the animation. In the future, if you want to change the content of the banner ad, this symbol is the place to do it.

Now make a button, but one containing only the Banner symbol that you just created. To do this, make a new symbol, name it Button, and give it the Button behavior. You'll see a blank stage and an empty timeline. Select the Up frame (where there is already an empty keyframe), drag the Banner symbol to the stage, center the symbol relative to the stage, then return to the main movie.

Because you assigned the movie clip behavior to Banner, the button containing Banner (Figure 2) will run through the animation automatically, regardless of what the mouse cursor does—which is how most banner ads work. In all other respects, the button is normal, though, so you can make it jump to a Web page when it is clicked. Just follow the previous section's directions, then Publish the Flash file, insert the resulting SWF into your HTML file as directed by the manual, and bingo! You've got your own Flash banner ad.

Preloading Flash Movies

One of the great things about Flash movies is that they are usually very small files, and they naturally stream: They start playing as soon as their first elements are downloaded into the Web browser. This isn't always as great as it sounds, though—as when your Flash file is filled with photos and other images, has lots of sounds, or is just plain long. In these cases, the Flash movie starts playing immediately but then stutters because larger elements take too long to arrive. The best way around the problem is a simple preloader.

Preloaders work by using Frame Actions—actions that occur when a specific frame plays within the movie. Frame actions are assigned to empty keyframes, so the actions aren't usually associated with objects or symbols on the stage. Preloaders use frame actions to see if an entire movie has been downloaded by the time an early frame has loaded. If so, the action jumps ahead to the actual movie content. Otherwise, the action makes the movie jump back to the first frame and repeat the process. Here's how to build a preloader.

Make a new file and add at least 50 frames, to start. Place a pair of keyframes at frames 21 and 22; this is where the different frame actions will go. Next, create a small animation that will run for 20 frames and will look good repeating itself for a few cycles. (Hint: You can make a 20-frame movie clip symbol and insert it into the main timeline at frame 1 if you like.) This will be what the user sees until the entire movie loads.