WEB DESIGN TUTORIALS - Learn how to design interactive websites with Macromedia Flash

Optimizing Sounds - If you have access to a sound editing application, you should use it to optimize your sounds before importing them into Flash®. The following are some tips to optimize your audio...

Sound Controls
Knowing how to get around the Sound tab in the Frame Properties window will facilitate the use of your audio. Below is a diagram that illustrates the various sound controls in Flash®...

Sync Setting in Flash - There are 4 synchronization options from which to choose: Event, Start, Stop and Stream as shown in the diagram below...

To Flash, or Not to Flash
When considering whether or not to incorporate Flash into your website, you must also consider the target market you are trying to reach...

Optimizing a website with Flash - In order to fully optimize the website's capacity to attract audiences, Flash has been used to provide highly, interactive and efficient websites by developers and designers. The following are techniques and advice by an expert web developer to produce an

Transferring Parameters from HTML to Flash - Until recently the most well-known and widely-used method for transferring variables of a Flash movie from HTML-view, was the addition of the segments to the URL of swf-document, as shown below...

Optimization of Flash Movies (Exclusive Article)
In this article we will show you 10 ways of optimizing your Flash Movies to make them as little as possible without any visual quality losses.

Removing Flash Movie Protection (Exclusive Article) - For an attentive study of the work of others, an analysis of their design decisions, understanding one or another moment when Flash technology was chosen in their designs, it can be quite helpful to download what you find an interesting Flash clip in an ...

Exclusive Website Review: Webagent007.com "Site of the Month"
The website www.webagent007.com has been appointed as "Site of the Month" (November 2004 ) at Web Design Library.

Spinning Text Meets Same Fate As Skip Intro
The early days of Swift 3D sort of remind me of the early days of Flash. People were so excited to finally have a great new tool to create cutting edge Web content, but were often struggling to find the best uses for that content.

Create Cool Site Navigation In A Flash - So you were just at a website and were so impressed with their navigation bar you want something just as cool for your own site. No problem. If you know where to look you'll find plenty of generators that will allow you to easily pump out some very slick

Making Professional Graphics For Your Flash Movies
What is the difference between your regular ole Flash site and a professional one? Well, it largely comes down to opinion, but there are also some key elements to look at. I've learned after viewing Flash sites for years that the ones that catch readers'

 

3D For Flash
Swift 3D is the most versatile tool for creating web-ready 3D animations for use with Macromedia Flash. Through the combination of an easy-to-use interface, the industry standard vector exporter and a full ray tracing rendering engine, Swift 3D enables 3D

Suggestions For A Flash Designer: Real World - Earlier this week I received a site submission I found very interesting. After reviewing the site I started typing out ideas that could help the designer. Some comments were about Flash, and were some about other design aspects. After reviewing my comment

Flash Web Design: Pros And Cons - Flash is a powerful web technology that achieves a high level of visual impact from the graphical point of view. Unfortunately, it is widely misused in web design. There are still many problems with Flash, especially related to usability and search engine

Flash for your website? - One of the big dilemmas when designing a website can be whether or not to use flash. In this article I'm going to go over the goods and the bads in hopes to help you make an educated decision. For those of you that are thinking "What is flash?" it's basic

Macromedia Flash - The Basic Concepts - INTRODUCTION Macromedia Flash is the vector based industrial standard authoring tool for producing artwork, animations, interactive movies and rich internet applications. The Flash package contains a variety of media to help the user learn the program qui

Guy Watson's Tips – I have heard so many people winge on the many community forums and mailing lists lately about the onLoad event handler not working with load Movie and although i posted a fix for the problem sometime ago, i found this very small and functional fix that does t

Flash Kit - We all want return visitors - how do we get them?
In this article we are going to give you an overview of the Flash application, how it can benefit your web site, and hopefully assist you in deciding if using the application on a corporate web site would be a step in the right direction or would hinder t

Flash Kit - The Power of Macromedia Flash A bird's eye view of Flash & its capabilities
As the Internet continues to grow with hundreds of thousands of pages being published everyday; the battle for drawing visitors to web pages and conveying them the message is getting harder and tougher.

Flash Kit - Developing an efficient website in Flash MX - Initially Flash was considered as a tool to support the websites with some eye-catching animation, flashy banners and intros. But now that the industry has realized the full potential of Flash, It has become a standard for developing highly professional,

Flash Kit - Hillman Curtis Interview - Known in the community as a master in the art of motion graphics, he has worked with some of the biggest names in the business.

Flash Kit - Introduction
The Flash MX component architecture introduces a powerful and flexible way to leverage existing code, both your own and that written by others. The opportunity to develop Flash components to be reused by others is limited only by your imagination.

Shadows as Borders: Tips and Tricks
There's a lot of lust for having shadows on a site lately. The drop-shadow craze was initiated by a few Web developers in early 2000, and the popularity has just exploded. Because of this popularity, a lot of people are wondering how to create them or get

Basic/Drawing - Bevel in Flash - Ever wished you could use Photoshop's bevel effect in Flash? That's right; Flash isn't known for easy style effects, but with my simple beveling technique, you can work around Flash's rather bland palette.

Basic/Drawing - Converting Bitmap to Vector
Instead of laboring many hours tracing a bitmap in Illustrator or Freehand, you can use a little known Flash tool to convert a bitmap into a vector - the Trace Bitmap Tool. There are two reasons you may prefer vector over bitmap in your flash movies. One:

Basic/Drawing - Using the Library - When working in Flash, you may find yourself having a large collection of symbols such as movie clips, buttons, and graphics. Having so many symbols can be difficult to keep track off, but Flash provides you with a feature that makes it easier - the Libra

Basic/Drawing - Creating a Motion Tween
What exactly is a motion tween? First, let's imagine that you place a box on the table. Now, imagine, that after 10 seconds, the box suddenly disappears and magically appears again a few inches to the right of where it had been originally. Pretty strange

Basic/Drawing - Frame Jumping - When you play an animation in Flash, unless you used Action Script, your animation simply moves through the timeline - displaying whatever is contained on those frames. That is very linear, and sometimes you would want to tell Flash to skip a few frames,

Basic/Drawing - Full Screen Flash Page - A simple tutorial to teach you how to create full screen Flash page within a HTML page. This tutorial may be a bit different from the usual full screen effects you've seen. It doesn't scale the height and width of the Flash file, but merely expands the Fl

Basic/Drawing - Creating Masks - What is masking? Masking is a simple way to reveal parts of a layer below. This tutorial will take you through many types of masking from static masking where a image is shown through a non moving mask, animated masks where the mask moves to reveal bits o

Basic/Drawing - Video in Flash MX 2004 - Video and the net are not the best of friends for the majority of net surfers. For the most part, due to large file sizes, you may be steered to other non-video formats such as - well, flash! Of course, with the growing popularity of broadband content.

Basic/Drawing - Fill Techniques - Close your eyes and imagine a world filled with nothing but outlines and sketch marks. That is how a world without fills would look. Now that the obligatory interesting introductory sentence is complete, let's deal with more important issues.

Basic/Drawing - Hide/View the Scrollbar Component - Whether it's an input or dynamic text box, many people dread the look of a disabled scrollbar. This tutorial will teach you how to apply a simple code to make the scrollbar invisible when it's not being used.

Basic/Drawing - Shiny Orbs - Nothing says "This person knows their gradient fills" like shiny orbs. You've created them in Photoshop now create nice shiny (vector based) glass orbs in Flash!

Special Effects - Hover Captions - Using hover captions is a great way to provide more information about some feature or element on your site. I'm sure you have seen hover captions in your operating system when you hover over an icon, for example. What we are doing in Flash is very similar

Special Effects - News Ticker - Flash is really great for quickly displaying content from an external data source. One area where that would be useful is with news tickers. Instead of having to recompile your FLA and upload a new version of your SWF each time something new happens, you

 

Special Effects - Duplicate Background
While scanning through the various threads in the Flash MX 2004 forum, there was a question asking whether it was possible to tile a background in Flash.

Special Effects - Loading Random Quotes
Loading random quotes into a text field in flash can add a little something extra to your website. Whether it be quotes by famous people, your favorite movie quotes or even your own quotes. In this tutorial you will be shown how to load random quotes fro

Special Effects - Adding Thumbnails
A popular tutorial on this site is the Photo Gallery using XML and Flash tutorial. As time went on, the forums were filled with requests to make modifications to the tutorial. In this tutorial, I will address several of the more common requests I notice

Special Effects - Animated Blur - In this tutorial, I will show how to create a blurry tween effect in Flash. Indeed the logic behind that effect is very simple, but as is often the case, it's the simplest problems that take the longest time.

Special Effects - Complex Button RollOver/RollOut Effects - It seems everywhere you look now has some form of complex button. Most buttons that have an animation when rolled over and an animation when you roll out are done with some form of this concept that I intend to share with you.

Special Effects - Photo Slideshow Using XML and Flash - In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a slideshow that loads image data from an XML file. While I will explain the new concepts and code used in making the slideshow, you must understand how my earlier photo gallery explained in the xml photo g

Special Effects - Falling Snow 2.0
A popular tutorial on this site, especially over the winter period, is the falling snow tutorial. The tutorial was, in my opinion, good because it created a balance between visual appeal and simple code. With the simpler code, though, came some annoying p

Special Effects - Liquify Image Effect - An ultra-simple touch of action script can turn an otherwise-still image or even a whole swf into a liquefied, stretchable rubbery treat !... If you're anything like me, you just love imposing contortions onto perfectly innocent loaded images! So if you'r

Special Effects - Photo Gallery Using XML and Flash - It is time for another photo gallery tutorial! This one is a little more advanced than the other photo gallery tutorial on this site. So, now, what would make me write another tutorial on a topic that has already been covered?

Special Effects - Coloring Book - This tutorial will teach you how to make a coloring book-style flash application, in which you can select colors, and click on certain sections of an image and change its color, or color it in, in other words.

Special Effects - Menu with Slider
You've all seen those menus where you roll over one of the buttons and an object slides into place right underneath it, right? Well, in this tutorial you will learn how to create one of those. We will be creating a very basic example, but like everything

Special Effects - Creating the the Shine Effect
Since we don't have too many tutorials on how to create some cool effects for animation, here's one that I've seen sites use. The effect looks amazing when you use it on a website with lots of Photoshop graphics. Here is an example, watch the shine in the

Special Effects - Random Motion
Oh no! Not another random motion tutorial on kirupa.com. There are already several, so why would I be writing another tutorial on random movement?

Special Effects - Loading Random Movies - Do your animations seem to get boring when viewed repeatedly? Do you want to give the impression to your visitors that you update your site regularly but you don't feel like doing all the work that goes along with updating regularly? You may need to add s

Special Effects - Pausing Animation - Ever wanted to pause at the best bit in your animation? Or maybe let the viewer pause, and look in detail at your well crafted animation? Well in this tutorial, I shall be showing you how to add a Pause, and play button into your animation!

Special Effects - Masking Dynamic Text and Device Fonts - Why can't I mask dynamic text or device fonts yell's the inspiring flash developer! It makes no sense! I can mask static text, why not dynamic text or device fonts?

Special Effects - Film Grain
A very cool defect I notice on older movies and films is the film grain effect caused by the aging of the actual film reels. While most would consider that to be a flaw, I take the converse of that view and think it is a really nifty effect. After all, on

Special Effects - Transitions Between External SWFs
Many people use external swfs these days, because they are a very good way to keep a site structured and manageable, and also because they keep the file size low. These swfs also divide a site into sections: each external swf stands for a section. These m

Special Effects - Timeline Effects - A much hyped about feature of Flash MX 2004 is the timeline effects. Timeline effects are a collection of special effects that you can customize and apply to an object on your stage such as a movie clip, graphic, etc. If you have ever used programs such a

Special Effects - Context Menus - The Context Menu class provides runtime control over the items in the Flash Player context menu, which appears when a user right-clicks (Windows) or Control-clicks (Macintosh) on Flash Player. You can use the methods and properties of the Context Menu class

Special Effects - Using CSS Styles in Flash MX 2004 - A new feature in Flash MX 2004 is the ability to use imported CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) data for your text. Instead of having a large block of text using the same font, color, and style, you can use CSS to define custom text properties without having t

Special Effects - Applying CSS to Externally Loaded Text
So, You want to apply CSS Styles to the text that you load from an external file? Well its not difficult at all, just consider, I was able to do it!!

Special Effects - Chromeless Pop-Up Window
If you happen to browse design sites, you are bound to see many javascript pop-up windows that display a page in a smaller, less buttoned version of your browser. A modification of the pop-up window is the Chrome less window. Unlike a regular pop-up where

Logo Replication - Have you ever wanted to use a band or company's logo in a flash animation? The problem with that is, you'd have to import an image of the logo, which wouldn't move smoothly and would lose quality. This tutorial will show you how to replicate the logo of y

Making an Object Transparent - In the tutorial listed below I will instruct you on how to make just about anything transparent

Creating a Basic Flash MX Animation - This tutorial will help you to learn the very basics of Flash MX - basics such as layers, tweens, colors, text, lines, shapes, and more. By the end of this tutorial…

Creating Drop-Down Menus
This tutorial requires only the basic knowledge of Flash….

Using Pixel Fonts
Have you ever visited a cool Flash site or viewed a cool Flash animation that did not use pixel fonts? Yes - you probably have, but for this tutorial's sake, let's just say you haven't. While pixel fonts have been popular in the print and graphic worlds f

Creating a Simple Shadow Effect - easy yet oft-overlooked effect anybody can create is the shadow effect. Technically, you are simulating a shadow by copying an object, pasting the object in a lower layer, offsetting the object a few pixels, and changing the color the object to look like

Creating a Basic Flash MX Animation - This tutorial will help you to learn the very basics of Flash MX - basics such as layers, tweens, colors, text, lines, shapes, and more. By the end of this tutorial, you will have created the following animation…

Fading Text - One great Effect that can be created in flash very easily is fading text it can make your site look a lot more cooler and gives you the facility of fading between images this tutorial will show you exactly how to do this.

Creating a Hyperlink - Flash is no longer just a program that you use to create cool special effects and animations. Flash is used extensively for navigation and other interactive purposes. A key facet to navigation is hyperlinks. You are familiar with hyperlinks in browsers; y

Editing an Object's Registration Point - What is a registration point? Do you know what I am talking about? Simply put, a registration point is the default location of an object from which an object's x and y co-ordinates are determined.

WebServices in Flash MX
This tutorial will explain how to consume a simple web service which gets Today's weather statistics based on a user input Zip code. It will also explain how to use a PHP proxy to get around Flash's security sandbox which prevents data from being loaded

Displaying Data from an External File
This tutorial will briefly explain how to load data from an external file. More importantly, you will learn how to display the data in your Flash animation.

Preloader and Transition for Dynamic Files - This tutorial will explain how to build a flash website with external SWF content, transition effect and also preload the external content

Loading Text from External Sources
You will be creating something similar to the following animation. Be sure to click on the number buttons to see what happens:…

Flash in Visual Basic
One of the things that Flash is good for is making great user interfaces, which is a feature most other programming languages lack.

Slider Bars
Sliders can be used in many ways in a site: to control sound, to scroll a text, or more generally to adjust the value of a variable at run-time. We are going to see in this tutorial how to build a very simple slider with Flash MX. Then one that is a tiny

Game: How to Fire
After several years of procrastinating, which I have perfected to an art form, I have decided to write tutorials for creating a full Flash game. Since creating a full game from the beginning is quite an undertaking, I have divided the various aspects of g

Percentage Preloader with Load Bar - This tutorial will explain step by step how to create your own pre loader that displays the percentage of your file that is loaded, and has a load bar that shows graphically how much is loaded

Experiments with Perspective
OK people. Now that you've all read and understood and experimented with the perspective tutorial (if not, click here), and that you feel that you have a good grasp on the concept, we can start the fun stuff.

Perspective in Flash - First I'd like to thank Keith Peters from bit-101 for introducing me to perspective in Flash. Be sure to check his site, it's one of the best experimental sites out there.

Preloader With Percentage
Many people want pre loaders to make there movies run more smoothly, but it is quite hard to find a piece of code which will display Percentage loaded section as well. That is where this tutorial comes in. With the use of just one component you will create

Controlling and Accelerating an Object
You may have tried the game control tutorials on kirupa.com and found them to be a little difficult even with Kirupa's greatly simplified explanations. Well, this tutorial will show you how to create movement for a car with only the use of 1 component.

Using the Preloader Component
This tutorial will show you how to easily make a loading bar by using a Flash MX Component

Using Components to Create a Form
This tutorial is more or less a sequel to Kirupa's tutorial about the scrollbar and mine about the list box. Please read them carefully before attempting this one

Scrolling Dynamically Loaded Text - One question that often appeared in my mailbox or on the forums regarded creating a text scroller that worked when text was loaded from an external text file. I had told users that it was not possible to create that effect until a user (Ged) e-mailed me w

Movement Using ActionScript - After reading a post on another site about a dearth of "scripted movement" tutorials, I realized how true that observation was. When was the last time you saw a comprehensive tutorial that outlines the basics on how to use programming to move an object ac

Preloader that Displays Load Progress
Welcome to the world of the preloader! Of all the various things people can accomplish in Flash, a preloader is a mystical concept which everyone uses yet no-one seems to be able to explain quite well.

Creating a Text Scroller
Ever tried creating a text scroller to scroll a few lines of text in Flash 5? If you haven't consider yourself lucky! Creating a text scroller in Flash 5 is the equivalent of writing the Declaration of Independence backwards from memory. Fortunately for u

Creating a Listbox
Flash Components, as you know, are supposed to make our life easier. Well, that's true, but you have to know how to use them. This tutorial will try to teach you how to use the List box Component. It involves several important functions:

Loading Techniques: Flash 5 & Flash MX - Loading into target was explained by Kirupa in this tutorial, that's why I won't talk at all about it here. We'll see how to load into target with Flash (5 or MX, it's the same), and then how to load dynamically with Flash MX.

Displaying Hover Captions - If Flash MX, Windows, Word, and other applications can have hover captions display when the mouse rests over an icon or command…

Shared Objects: Flash MX Cookies - Shared Objects are a new feature of Flash MX. They are used to store data on the user's machine, the same way cookies would.

Games: Keeping Score - While this tutorial will not cover how to create a killer game like galaxian, tetris, or pacman, this tutorial will introduce you to the world of scoring in Flash.

Mouse Trail - You've probably seen this effect all over the internet. It's actually nothing too hard. In this tutorial I'm going to explain you how to make the mouse trail with only action script! Yes, that's right, only action script, absolutely no graphics are used in

Date Countdown Timer - Here you will learn to create a countdown timer which counts down from the current date and time to a specific date and time in the future. This example will use days, hours, minutes, seconds and even milliseconds retrieved from Flash's Date object to cal

Vibration Effect
This tutorial, as you may presume, will help you to create the vibration effect above. I will also take care to explain the code behind this effect so that you can hopefully create a cooler animation on your own:

Creating a Volume Control Slider - While a simple sound 'on' or sound 'off' button is acceptable, a volume slider is even better! A volume slider is a small bar that you can drag to increase or decrease the volume of any sound. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create just that.

Creating a Sound Bar
Now a-days, clients and visitors are looking for more in a Flash website. One way to add an entire new dimension to your website is to add sound. This tutorial will show you how to build a one song sound controller for your website

Create Falling Snow - What good is a holiday animation without some snow? That is what I thought until I tried to create a snow animation that looks reasonably realistic. Most tutorials found throughout the net were either too complicated or not realistic enough.

Cartoon Animation
Flash is one of those wonderful programs that can be put for a plethora of uses. But one of the most common things people want to be able to do with it is make cartoons and animations.

Creating Equilibrium Points
In this tutorial, we'll take a gander at what simple mathematics can accomplish when used right. =0) With simple math, we can do all sorts of stuff, i.e. EQ points. IF you paid attention in math classes in grade school, this won't be new to you

Grassy Field: Concept Study
As I was browsing through the forums, I noticed a really nice flash footer created by the moderator lostinbeta. In his footer, he has pictures of grass moving in response to the mouse. In short, the footer was cool and I wanted to create something like it

 

The Infinite Menu - We are going to see in this tutorial how to achieve very simply one of the most popular menus: the infinite menu. There are of course several ways to do it, from the first one created by Yugo Nakamura (hang on to your seat) a while ago, to the one you are

Easing on Mouse Click - This is the second edition of tutorials on easing, if you missed the first one, it can be found HERE. This tutorial will teach you the basics of easing by moving an object to where the mouse was clicked on the stage. Other than being an important part of

Mouse Follow with Easing
Easing is an important part of Actionscripted(AS) motion. It adds a realistic feel by speeding up and slowing down an object depending on its position to its final destination. This tutorial will teach you the basics of easing by moving an object to where

Alpha Graphic Fade with Inertia
This tutorial will work for Flash 5 and Flash MX! I will specify steps only used in Flash MX in blue and steps just for Flash 5 is red. The script to do this effect was very easy but took a lot of random creativity and I never would have been able to do t

News Flasher - In this tutorial , you will learn how to use the component " Headlab News Flasher V1.1.2. Its quite simple, download the extension from the flashcomponents.net site by clicking here.

Circular Movement - If there is one thing I like in a Flash animation, it has to be simplicity. I am usually not impressed with large background images with an Eric Jordan (2Advanced) inspired look. I was playing around with some ActionScript, and decided there needed to be

Launching a Centered Pop-Up Window - A common feature that you can see on many Flash sites is the pop-up window. While this site features several tutorials on creating variations of the pop-up window, this one is a little bit different; it is centered. You click a button and the new window o

Create a Photo Gallery - One thing that I have always been thankful for was the great people who help keep the site's content fresh and engaging. More often than not, I have often been inspired to write a tutorial based on a user's post on the forum. This tutorial is no exception

Creating Continuous Movement
A popular feature of my site (kirupa.com) has been the scrolling circles, emoticons, squares, etc. that can be found on my homepage and in my forum footer. People often ask me how I created that animation, and, needless to say, they walked away after I ga

Making Flash Movies Transparent - Did you know, that just like a GIF image, Flash animations can be made transparent when displayed in a Web page? I bet that you probably did not think that it was possible.

Displaying Hover Captions - What in the world is a hover caption? Must be another name Kirupa made up." Now that you mention it, I think I did make the name up. A hover caption is the text that appears when you hover your mouse over a command icon or button. When you hover over the

Loading a Random Background
Hardly a day goes by where I do not come across a really cool Flash site that features a background that loads randomly when loaded. Each time you press Refresh, the page loads, and, you guessed it, a new background appears! This seems simple doesn't it?

Random Movement in Flash MX - A common observation users made on this site when migrating from Flash 5 to Flash MX is that some of the animations that worked in Flash 5 no longer work in Flash MX. One such animation was the popular Random Motion tutorial. Of course, an answer was righ …

Drawing Line Art in Flash - If you're a dab hand with the mouse, you could always draw your artwork straight off onto the screen, but most of us mortals are going to need a picture to work with as a base. If your creative skills leave a little to be desired, or you're new to working

Generating HTML Code to View Flash - There are two questions that get asked of me the most: How do I publish a Flash animation? How can I make my animation transparent?

Reducing File Size - Flash is known for publishing animations that do not take up a lot of file space. The vector format of the Flash SWF file is ideal for the Web because it uses math instead of actual images to store animation elements.

Maximize Flash in Your Browser
How many times have you asked yourself the following question: "How does that animation take up every pixel of space in the browser?" The answer lies in using percent widths instead of pixel widths when publishing.

Flash & HTML Frames
A difficult issue to explain to my posters on my message board regards the use of frames. Using Flash to target a certain frame might be simple if you know HTML or how frames work, but 99% of the people using Flash don't spend too much time worrying about

AIM/E-Mail Button
In this tutorial we will create a Button that when pressed will open up an AOL Instant Messenger window with your Screen Name and your desired message. We will also create a Mail button, so that clients can contact you through mail.

Animated Rollover
In this tutorial we will create an animated button similar to the one found on my site. Before reading this tutorial Launch FLASH and make sure your frame rate is at 30fps.

Flash 5 HTML Code - Even though Flash animation are not created in HTML, they need to have some HTML code to display the animations in a Web browser. The scroll box below contains the HTML code that Flash outputs for publishing animations.

Publishing Flash Animations - Often times, a lot of you post on my message board or email me when there is something that you would need help on. Publishing Flash animations and making it work on a server has been on of the most requested questions in the recent couple of days. Below

Adding A Button - Unlike regular HTML, buttons are more than just simple navigation interfaces. In Flash, any object can be a button. Buttons not only provide feasible methods of taking the user to another page, but buttons also create an interface where certain advanced f

Linking A Button - Sometime or another, you are going to be linking your Flash animation to another page through your Web browser. In Flash, only buttons can be used to link to another page when the user clicks the mouse. This tutorial will teach you how to link to another

Adding Sound To A Button - This tutorial will show you exactly how to add sounds to a button. Before we begin, if you don't know how to create a button, please read the tutorial on creating buttons first by clicking here.

Loading Movies From A Remote Location - As Flash movies have become extremely complex; it becomes necessary to keep some portions of a movie on a separate file. The SWF files can easily be loaded onto the main movie quite easily. This tutorial will explain to you how to go about doing that. So,

Antialiasing in Flash 5
One of the best qualities of Flash is its ability to handle the zooming of elements without having them lose quality. For example, see example below

Hyperlinking Text - One of the most common email enquiries that I receive at kirupa.com is about hyper linking. So, below, is the compilation of all the email responses into one concise tutorial. Enjoy!

Naming Movies
Naming movies is essential for interactive animations you may decide to create in the future. Naming the movie clips you create helps to "Target" the movies you may wish to add an action to. The first step, is to create the movie clip.

Gradient Fills - Gradient fills really add a spark of color to any element you may be working on in Flash. An example of a gradient fill is shown in the image below

Pool of Squares
This is a little animation that plays a simple animation whenever the mouse hovers over the area

Text Masking: Follow Mouse - The example and the tutorial below will help you to create a mask that follows the mouse….

Text Masking: Drag Mask - While you can create a text mask that can follow your mouse, it is time to allow the mask to be "drug" around by you dragging! This isn't a cumulative tutorial, and the partial source code is provided below. There will be a section explaining what I have

Using Movie Clips In Your Animations - After reading Hillman Curtis's great book "Flash Web Design", I too started experimenting with using Videos in my animations. And anyone who has any interest in it can too. You don't even need a video camera at all. Just go to the web and download some ro

Masking Effect Using Images
Forget the little spotlight effects that are prevalent on so many sites teaching you how to Mask. This tutorial will help you to create an amazing mask effect on text using a background image. To see how cool that really looks, look at the animation below

DHTML Combined with Flash
In my endless pursuit of making Flash more than just a simple animation on a site, I wanted to do something different with a simple animation that made some use of the advanced HTML technologies out there.

Using Flash With PowerPoint 97/2000
Being a designer and a High School student, I make numerous presentations in differing situations. Usually, I'd carry my laptop around and give PowerPoint presentations, but I always felt that it just wasn't what I was looking for in giving my audience a

Lighting Mask - Hey there! In this tutorial we'll learn how to achieve this nice looking, yet very simple effect:

Ray of Light Revisited - Since I've had numerous requests for this piece, I've finally gotten around to rewriting the tutorial from Suga himself, as detailed in New Master's of Flash ISBN 1-903450-03-9. I'm hoping that my simple style of spelling out the basics will help some of

Creating Falling Snow on HTML Pages
Being a hardware/software fanatic, I was doing my daily rounds around popular computing sites checking up on the day's latest downloads. Because it was the holiday season, numerous sites had their layouts and graphics changed to reflect the holiday season

Motion Blur: Special FX - In this tutorial we will create a blur effect that works great with Text or Images. I recommend using this as roll over movie for a button. You can find a tutorial on how to make an animated Button roll over Here.

Opening Borderless Windows - For some of us, simply opening new browser windows without the buttons is not enough. A browser window without the address bar, back and forward buttons, and status bars is considered too 20th century.

Random Letter Cycling - By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to create a little movie that randomly selects letters and stops on the letter you want it to:

Continuously Scrolling Image - nice effect that I use frequently on my site is the image scroll. Unlike image scrolls you may see on other sites, you are going to make the scroll continuous without any breaks or gaps.

Using JavaScript to Open New Window
know what you are thinking. I set the target to _blank when adding a URL right? True, but today we are going to go beyond making simple windows open in Flash. Not only are we going to open new windows, we will control the attributes of each window such a

Pool of Squares - This is a little animation that plays a simple animation whenever the mouse hovers over the area:

Text Masking: Follow Mouse - After having answered many emails and message board posts on how to create a mask that follows the mouse AND how to drag a mask, I decided to create a tutorial on how to do both. This tutorial is two pages long (one page per each concept). Before you sta

Text Masking: Drag Mask - While you can create a text mask that can follow your mouse, it is time to allow the mask to be "drug" around by you dragging! This isn't a cumulative tutorial, and the partial source code is provided below. There will be a section explaining what I have

Using Movie Clips In Your Animations
After reading Hillman Curtis's great book "Flash Web Design", I too started experimenting with using Videos in my animations. And anyone who has any interest in it can too. You don't even need a video camera at all. Just go to the web and download some ro

Masking Effect Using Images
Forget the little spotlight effects that are prevalent on so many sites teaching you how to Mask. This tutorial will help you to create an amazing mask effect on text using a background image. To see how cool that really looks, look at the animation below

DHTML Combined with Flash
In my endless pursuit of making Flash more than just a simple animation on a site, I wanted to do something different with a simple animation that made some use of the advanced HTML technologies out there.

Sliding Menu
This effect is a prolongation of the draggable menu effect, and since both effects have a lot in common, I will not explain everything. That's why I'd recommend you to complete the draggable menu tutorial before you start this one.

Draggable Menu 2.0 - Part I : Making it Work - OK. I've just realized that the tutorial I made for that effect was impossible to understand, even for me, so here's

Real Fake Drag Mask 1.0 - There's one thing I always wanted to do : drag a mask. Actually, that's how I got on kirupa.com first. I found that dragging mask tutorial, that surely you all completed since it's very easy and looks fantastic. But one day, it just hit me in the eye : in

Global Mouse Cursor - In this tutorial we will create a Global mouse cursor. This cursor is perfect for a Multi scene site or Those who are looking for an alternative to the usual "start drag and hide mouse" script. Before embarking on this tutorial you should have some basic

Tell Target - Many of you have seen sites that react with interesting animations, etc. when you click on an element in Flash. While it may look like it was a very clever use of Go To And Play, it is more than likely an advanced function called the "Tell Target

Advanced Rollovers
The button rollovers and simple text effects do not provide the level of control you need for creating killer animations.

More Tell Target - This section basically deals with advantages and various uses of the Tell Target function. If you need to know how to use this function, please visit the Tell Target Tutorial. As with many computer functions, there are no strict guidelines besides the bas

Follow Mouse
Flash allows for various instances (movie clips) to be dragged or made to follow the mouse. Unlike Flash 4, Flash 5 also allows the entire mouse pointer to be hidden from the animation itself. That allows for "custom" mouse pointers in the animation that

Finding Values in an Array - In Flash, you have the indexOf function that allows you to find text in an array of string data. That is great if you are only working with strings, but you will often run into situations where your array is more than just strings. If your array contains

Duplicate Movie Clips (MX2004)
It's been about three years since I addressed this topic in the original duplicate movie clips tutorial: http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/duplicate.htm I guess three years is a long time when it comes to the internet, so it's about time that I

Detecting Direction of Mouse Movement
In Flash, you have the onMouseMove event that executes any code when your mouse is moving. In some cases, executing code simply based on mouse movement may not be enough. How would you like to learn how to determine the direction of mouse movement so that

Finding Maximum/Minimum Value in an Array
I was a bit dismayed to find out that Flash had no simple built-in way of getting the maximum value from an array. You have Math.max(), but that function returns only the greater of two values. The Array.sort and Array.sortOn methods were too complicated

Using the Microphone - The ability to interact with a microphone is something that was introduced in recent versions of Flash. I hope you will get the idea of how to use a microphone in Flash from this tutorial

Calculating the Distance between Objects
Mathematical functions within Flash seems to be an area that most people like to stay well clear of. Of course, this area of Flash can be very daunting and difficult to get a hold of, so to ease you in, I thought I'd write a tutorial that takes a mathemat

Binary-Decimal Conversion
In this tutorial, I'm going to introduce you to the binary number system, if you don't already know it, and teach you to convert a decimal number into binary and vice versa using a little bit of code in Flash. First of all, I assume all of you know what t

Tab Ordering Forms
If you're viewing this tutorial, it's probably because you're one of those flashers that are trying to use the tab key to only focus on a certain type of object in flash.

AS 2.0 Variable Hints [Coding Efficiency] - This short article is on variable naming in the new Actionscript 2.0 (and 1.0, I guess).

Commenting Your Code - Most of the best programmers on the world will tell you that: always comment on your code. For yourself and for the others. This is absolutely vital. Personally, before writing any line of code, I write in commentary everything I want to do.

Naming Conventions
The naming scheme of your movie is very important for readability purposes. I mean that the type of the entity you are referring to should be obvious just by looking at its name.

How to put a picture underneath the SWF file
How to put an SWF file on top of a picture directly in your html page. Adding a picture underneath your Flash animations requires a bit of hand coding. You can do this in the html editing mode of your html editor...

Importing Flash into VB6, C++, c# .NET
By following these simple steps, you will be up and running in no time at all and impressing all of your visitors with your talents! You basically need 2 simple things: use the Flash player as a component in your project and then catch and act on the even

How to insert an SWF file into an HTML page in Notepad - Adding a custom-made Flash animation created with Mix-FX into HTML editors like Frontpage or Dreamweaver is easy. However, if you do all the coding by hand in Notepad, or your HTML editor does not have a standard Insert Flash option, things can become a b

How to insert SWF files into Powerpoint
Importing Flash files created with Mix-FX into PowerPoint is a snap. By following these simple steps, you will be up and running in no time at all and impressing all of your visitors with your talents!

Dreamweaver Flash Tutorial - Adding a custom Flash animation created with is a snap in Dreamweaver. By following these simple steps, you will be up and running in no time at all and impressing all of your visitors with your talents!

Flash Tutorial Frontpage 2003 - Adding a custom-made Flash animation to Microsoft Frontpage 2003 is a snap. By following these simple steps, you will be up and running in no time at all and impressing all of your visitors with your talents! First create your Flash movie...

Live Analogue Clock - This is a real-time clock. It uses a very simple ASP script, a bit of ActionScript, and some easy Flash. Start a new movie. Begin by drawing the 2 clock hands. The minute hand must be less than half the total height of the stage...

Kaleidoscope - Let's get trippy with an easy-to-build kaleidoscope! A simple bit of masking and some tweening is all it takes to achieve something that looks a lot more complex.

Orbiting Sphere - Don't know how to give the illusion of motion in a 3D space? The technique used in this tutorial is quite straightforward and easily adapted.

Simple Directional Fade
Here's a fairly simple technique to achieve a directional fade-in. Using this method, you can fade any object into view from any direction...

Smashed Text - Text effects are a popular use for Flash. Here you'll create a text that flies apart in shards in a 'smashed window' effect.

Dancing Letters - Using ActionScript, we'll transform static text into something dynamic, attention grabbing, and memorable.

Mouse Trails!
Keep your visitors amused with cursor trails, created using a the Duplicate Movie Clip Action, and you won't lose them while your main movie loads.

Percentage Preloader - This is a very common request. A lot of people want a preloader that they can use to indicate the download progress of their movie before it actually plays. This has the benefit of preventing the movie from playing while it is still streaming (when the mo

Crosshair Targetting - You've probably seen this in a lot of shooting games. A crosshair follows the mouse around the screen. This tutorial demonstrates how to make horizontal and vertical lines follow the cursor…

Loading Variables From a .txt File Into Text Fields - In this tutorial I shall use this e-mail address as an example: fktutorials@snooboo.com Here is the very basic command that will work on a button or hot text in Flash (or HTML for that matter)…

Creating a Sliding Volume Control
Create a MC (we'll call it "ambience2") In our MC's timeline we will do the following: Layer1: this is the layer we will place our frame scripts in. - first frame we leave blank, - second frame : (place a lablel on this frame, we will call it "on")...

Balance Slider or Panning Effect - Using the predefined Objects for sound under Frame Actions, you can manipulate the volume and pan of a particular sound. In this tutorial, we will take up creating a balance slider which will allow you to shift the sound from one channel (right or left) t

Creating Sound Effects - Creating effects with sound is easy in Flash ®. You can create stereo effects from mono files for example by placing the same sound file you wish to affect in proximity on separate layers. In the diagrams below, we took one sound file and placed it on two

Content Based Soundtracks in Flash - Follow Keith Kubal through the ins and outs of playing back multiple soundtracks in a Flash site. He'll show you how to set sound to match content using advanced Flash techniques.

Layering Audio
killersound recognizes that Flash® can be used as a sequencer or mixer similar to software used by digital musicians to sequence music. Generally each composition is made up of various elements or components such as bass, drums, melody, etc. Each

Null Sound Technique
This whitepaper contains a detailed description of the so called "NULLSOUND" streaming technique, which can be used for making music for Flash® presentations with the file size 90% smaller than the file size generated by the traditional streaming sounds m

Sound Equalizer - This tutorial will explain how to use sound objects, Smart Clips and ActionScripting to create an interactive 3 band graphic equalizer effect with volume control.

A Simple Clock Can be a Nice Feature for Your Website - Step1 : Create a movie clip. Step2 : Create a DYNAMIC text box. In the PROPERTIES pallet of the text box give the text box a variable name. For instance "time". Step3 : In frame 1 of the movie type this simple one line code...

Creating a Sliding MC
This should be your final outcome. Click on the buttons and see the images slide. You can slide anything... images, text, or even other movie clips. Notice in this example the images are actually buttons with links:…

Pop up Browser Windows in Flash
This tutorial will show you how to cause new browser windows to open up via javascript in your flash movie. You can adjust many aspects of the new browser window with this script...

Creating a Preloader With a "Percentage Bar" - Go to the scene palet and creat a new scene. Name it "preload". On the first frame, layer 1 of this scene, you will want to place whatever graphics and/or text you wish people to see while your movie loads up. For the sake of this tutorial just type the w

Custom Mouse Cursor Used Together With Draggable Objects
Using this tutorial, you will learn how to create and implement a text mask to customize your mouse cursor with a movie clip.

Simple user name and password login
From text boxes to adding buttons and ActionScript, we will create a simple username and password menu.

Sound Controls - Knowing how to get around the Sound tab in the Frame Properties window will facilitate the use of your audio. Below is a diagram that illustrates the various sound controls in Flash®…

Sync Setting in Flash
There are 4 synchronization options from which to choose: Event, Start, Stop and Stream as shown in the diagram below...

Trouble Shooting Sound in Flash
When I set one of my sounds to loop, it doesn't do so seamlessly. Why? Most likely, your sound contains gaps or silence and has not been edited properly. You can remedy this in two ways…

Envelope Points - Once a sound is attached to a frame in Flash ®, you can use a maximum of 8 envelope points to manipulate that sound. Envelope points (appearing as little squares in the diagram below) are really volume controls that allow you to create effects such as pan

Creating a colored masking effect
This tutorial covers the creation of a masking effect where different colored shapes will appear to pass through a given object.

In / Out points - If you do not have access to a sound editing application in which you can optimize your sounds, Flash® gives you limited ability to "edit" your sounds. That is, you can delete from your sound files any unnecessary silence or gaps which you would not want

Compression settings in Flash
It is always best to import the best quality sound into Flash® and not anything less. Let Flash® do the work of compression. Generally the best quality sounds are in 44Khz Stereo 16 bit format. This is CD quality sound…

How to make Scrolling Text
This tutorial has been created and tested with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX and may not work with every version of the product.

Mailto Function in Flash MX - Mailto function in flash is not much different than Mailto function in HTML. In HTML this function is applied on links, whereas in Flash it is applied on buttons…

Importing Images and Movies into Flash (Exclusive Tutorial)
Quite often you need to import a sequence of images into Flash. They can be imported from any editor, and be either 3D or 2D style, or simply a set of pictures which you want to insert frame-by-frame into Flash...

Transferring Parameters from HTML to Flash (Exclusive Tutorial) - Until recently the most well-known and widely-used method for transferring variables of a Flash movie from HTML-view, was the addition of the segments to the URL of .swf-document, as shown below...

3D Animation in Flash (Exclusive Tutorial) - There are a few ways to prepare 3D animated objects for use in Flash. Here we present the most effective one, from the point of view of final results.

Handwriting Effect
This is a simple yet cool effect. This tutorial was done in Flash MX 2004, so the location of some of the menu bar things will be different in from MX, but of course it will work just as well in MX. Step 1. Make a new document I doesn't have to be very bi

How to make flash (.swf) transparent?
There are two ways to make flash file transparent, one is to export as a transparent file when you are publishing from Macromedia Flash and another to insert a line of code in the HTML. We will cover both ways in this tutorial. Browsers that support flash

Shape Tweening
This is a basic tutorial teaching you how to make an image move, but at the same time transform. 1. Make a new image, ours is 300 x 300 - with a the background - #D8E0E5. 2. In frame one of layer 1, create any kind of shapes you like...

Buttons
This will teach you how to make a rollover button for your website. 1. Start out with any canvas size. You will need 'matter' of some kind, that's either.. a picture, or some text. In this tutorial, we will just use text...

Create preloader in FlashMX
In this tutorial you will learn how to create a preloader that will return a percentage. It can then be used for things such as a preloader bar. Preloaders that work out percentages are important because they give the users of your site feedback of how mu

Steel Effect in Flash - In this Macromedia Flash tutorial I will show you how to use layer masking to create Steel Effect, this looks great as shown below, remember I have used Flash V. 5.0 but you can use Flash 4.0, I expect you to know the basics of Flash animation like making

Loading an external movie
There are two methods of loading external movies into Flash: Loading into an empty movie clip (mc) or loading into another level…

Tutorial - FLA Deconstruction
Through the next few issues we are going to take this FLA and deconstruct the file showing you exactly how it's made and how you can make a similar-style site. I have always been a fan of this FLA because of it's clean design and load time. This FLA File

Using Anchors To Bookmark And Navigate
With Flash MX you have the option to publish your movies with Named Anchors. This will add anchor tags to your HTML enabling your viewers to bookmark pages inside your flash movies as well as use their browser back and forward buttons...

Building Web Sites With Macromedia Studio MX - Book Excerpt
Macromedia's release of the MX Studio essentially turned their entire web product line inside out and rearranged the molecules. Instead of separate products performing specialized tasks, the tight integration of the tools-Freehand, Flash MX, Fireworks MX,

Making Professional Graphics For Your Flash Movies - What is the difference between your regular ole Flash site and a professional one? Well, it largely comes down to opinion, but there are also some key elements to look at. I've learned after viewing Flash sites for years that the ones that catch readers'

Bar Preloader - The idea behind this preloader is that we halt the progression of the movie and find out our filesize. We find then find out how much of that is loaded, use these numbers to create a percentage and then affect the scale of our bar to represent this. We wi

Transparent Flash And DHTML Layers
You can't go to a major web site anymore and not have an ad pop-up on you, layered over all your text. Usually they're done in Flash, complete with animation and interactive features. Nissan has produced some of the coolest buy far. Microsoft has a new on

Film Grain
A very cool defect I notice on older movies and films is the film grain effect caused by the aging of the actual film reels. While most would consider that to be a flaw, I take the converse of that view and think it is a really nifty effect. After all, on

Using Flash And Java To Create Pop-Ups - With Flash it is quite common to have a customized pop up window to hold your flash movie. This is almost always done using HTML and JavaScript. Well, what about having buttons in your flash movies that will open customized pop up windows?

Creating A Custom Mouse Curser In Flash - I'm going to show you how to make your mouse arrow customized using simple actionscript in Flash. This is a neat effect you can use if you want the mouse to match the scheme of your site, but try not to go overboard as lots of Flash developers have done i

Flash Transitions - This tutorial explains a quick and easy way to transition through different aspects of your site. Transition refers to transitioning content out before transitioning content in. The tutorial covers how to dynamically attach your navigation or how to hard

Creating A Photo Scrapbook With Flash - This week we are going to create a photo scrapbook using Flash MX 2004. The goal for this project is to create an easy and fun photo viewing application that allows the user to drag pictures within the movie and bring the chosen picture to the front for e

How To Create A Dynamic Web Site In Flash MX - Introduction This tutorial shows you how to create a basic website with nothing on the stage. This will involve dynamically loading jpegs and creating movieclips via actionscript.

Working With Flash MX 2004 and PHP - This tutorial is going to show you a very basic method of sending information from Flash to an external PHP script. This is merely a primer to get you working with using Flash for forms and dynamic content. The actual code for this tutorial can be used IN

Looping Movies With Flash MX 2004 - It has come to my attention from working with Flash MX 2004 Professional that there isn't a quick way to loop a movie a certain amount of times without using action script. To find a better solution and a quick fix for a friend over the week I have come u

Working With The Accordion UI Component
This week we are going to make a simple site using the new accordion UI component in Flash MX 2004 Professional. In this tutorial I will assume that you have basic knowledge of Flash MX 2004 Professional and can get around the interface pretty easily

Sound Loops
Here's an easy tutorial for Flash beginners on how to achieve a simple text bevel effect.

Physics in Flash - Gravity - Every story has to start somewhere, and in this story we begin with our good friend Sir Isaac Newton. Newton's theories have been, and are still the primary theories studied to understand the way things happen around us. In this series of tutorials we are

Improving Flash Cursors - One of the cool things with Flash 5 is the ability to hide the cursor. However as many people will tell you this can cause some issues with usability. One of the things with the internet and the cursor is that people get used to having the cursor change o

Object Follow Mouse
Learn how to make an object follow the mouse and speed up or slow down depending on how far away the object is. Alrighty, open up a new flash document and make 2 layers. Name them actions and ball.(top pic) On the ball layer draw a circle with no line col

Collision Detection
Learn how to use hitTarget to detect collisions and how to make it work for your movies.

Cool Flash Masking Effect - In this tutorial, we are going to add a nice effect like the one below. This effect works particularly well industrial and robotic images as well as objects with curves and fluid lines.

Dessolving Words - Step 1: Type the text you're gonna dissolve on it's own separate layer. It's good to name this layer so you don't get it confused with other stuff in your movie. Step 2: Convert your text into a movie clip symbol. Either click Insert> Convert to Symbol, o

Double click - Learn how to use getTimer() to make an event happen when a user double clicks

Draggable Masks - Learn how to dynamically create a mask and drag it across your movie..

First Person Games - This won't exactly teach you how to make a flash version of virtua - cop but, it's a basic way to make a first person shooter, with a hand that moves - adding a bit more realism to the game. My art work is rubbish - but that…

Movie Functions
First what you need to do is make or import your graphic which you want to mutilate. Select the image, then make a new movie clip by going to Insert>Convert To Symbol. Select "movie clip" and name it anything you would like, I called mine "logo". (You can

Zoom Blur Effect - This is a comprehensive and detailed tutorial on creating a Zoom Blur Effect for using when transitioning from one picture to another. Lets Get started. 1- First decide what images you want to be zoomed in and out of.....

Digital timer - Learn how to create a digital using Flash's getTimer() function.

ActionScript for Newbies - This is the first part of the ActionScript for Newbies series of tutorials. In this tutorial we'll be covering the basics of ActionScript. Stuff you'll need to know before you use ActionScript. I wrote this tutorial using Flash MX Professional 2004 but ev

Encoder / Decoder-1 bit Encryptor - Flash's programming language ActionScript is used in a plethora of instances ranging from graphical use right up to technical backend database integration (along with other languages). In this tutorial I will discuss how to create a 1-bit encryption progr

Flash masking - Masking, in itself, is a very simple process. You take one image, (the mask), and you stick something under it, (the masked). Whatever the shape of the mask is, is how the masked will look. Kinda like cutting a shape out of a piece of paper and laying the

Flash-Motion Tweening - Motion tweening was introduced into flash as an alternative to more traditional methods such as keyframe animation, which was outlawed because of its limits and boundaries. Tweening for flash covered leaps and bounds because it allowed the user to use fla

Scrolling Text [ flash 5 ]
Often asked is this "How to I make scrolling text in Flash?", and well there are a number of ways. However the easiest is using the built in scroll and maxscroll properties. Every text field automaticaly has these properties, and when can use simple comma

Macromedia Flash - The Basic Concepts - INTRODUCTION Macromedia Flash is the vector based industrial standard authoring tool for producing artwork, animations, interactive movies and rich internet applications. The Flash package contains a variety of media to help the user learn the program qui

Using LoadMovie
In this tutorial we're going to take a look at the function loadMovie. LoadMovie is a very nifty function, though things can get in a huge mess quickly. You often get questions on the forum about this topic, so that's why this tutorial has been created. I

Using Cookies in Flash - Okay, so we've all seen those sites that log your IP, tell you what system your PC is running and other odd details. There is a tutorial in our php section, that teaches you how to gather users information. Here however we are going to take a basic cookie

Accessing ID3 tags.external.mp3 - In Flash MX you have the capability to load an external mp3 sound file into a flash movie using the Sound.loadSound() method. In the latest release of the Flash 6 Player it is possible to access the ID3 tags embedded in an mp3 encoded file. Unfortuneatley

Alpha /Onion Skin - Learn how to get a cool alpha fading, onion skin type of effect used by many websites.

Animated buttons - One of the most impressive tools with Flash is the ability make animated buttons. Learn how to make OnMouse animated buttons!

Creating Basic Flash Menu - 1. Before we begin creating the whole navigation system were going to have to create a new document depending on how many links you need. In this tutoria.....

Changing colors in movie clips - 1.Create a big rectangle as shown above. 2.Convert the rectange to a movie clip and give it an instance name of rectangle 3.Create a small square button . 4.Create a small text field give variable name hexcode. 5.Give action to the button as below.

Color Flash Light For Flash MX - Ok.. To start off. Lets set up the Stage of the movie. Set the Size of the stage to: width 400 by height 250. Make the background color Black, and set the Frame rate to 22. Next thing, Lets create the layers. Create 4 ..

Custom Cursors
Learn how to create a custom cursor for your flash movies

Disable settings…Option - Export your movie with either the width or height less than 215 x 138 and the Right-Click settings option will be disabled as above, this could be used to the flash author's advantage, ie.. Create a movie that asks for full permissions domain wide, and th

Flash MX Event Model - One of my favourite new features of Flash MX, has to be the new event model, it just makes life so much easier and makes coding so much more fun and so much more organised. If you dont know much about it, then now is the time to find out, you really are m

Checking if a file exists - Sometimes it is necessary to determine if a file exists using actionscript, for example when you have a preloader cue, that loads a series of .jpgs one after another, if one of the files doesnt exist then the cue wouldnt traverse any further, you could of

Invisible Button - Learn how to use invisible buttons to add functionality to almost any flash app

Keyboard Controlled Movement - This tutorial will introduce the basics of using the keyboard to control a character / shape in your game.

onKeyDown VS onClipEvent(keyDown)
All movieclips automatically subscribe to amongst other objects, the Key objects event notifications, this means that you can define any of the Key event handlers within your movieclip, without having to explicitly subscribe to the Key objects, event noti

Spotlight Masking of it - Let's begin. Firstly select the rectangle tool. Draw a rectangle as big as the stage. The colour of the fill should be the colour that you want to your spotlight mask to be. Next select the text tool and type out the text over the box on the stage. Make s

Generic Preloader
This tutorial will teach you the fine art of creating your own generic preloader. That is, a preloader that you can drag and drop into ANY movie clip without modifying the code in any way. The preloader in this tutorial includes: - an indication of the pe

Preloader
In this tutorial you will learn how to create a preloader that will return a percentage. This percentage can then be used for things such as a preloader bar. Preloaders that work out percentages are important b.....

Simple Preloader - In flash, go to modify>>scenes. Click on the plus sign, or the new scene button. Rename the scenes preloader and scene. Now select preloader. Get rid of the scenes window, and press T on your keyboard (or select the text tool). Type "Loading" on your page

Reduce a string - This morning i needed to reduce any given string to a certain length and then place a pattern at the end of the string, in this case a simple '....' but the reduction had to take into account full words, meaning, i didnt want to just split the string in a

Macromedia Flash- Making a Simple Login - This tutorial shows the most basic way to create a user login interface using nothing but flash and its components

Simple Text - Here's an easy tutorial for Flash beginners on how to achieve a simple text bevel effect.

Creating time in Flash
1.Create a new movie with width=200 and height=75 . 2.Create a text field name it time. 3.Name the current layer textfield. 4.Create a new layer above the current layer and name it actions 5.Create two key frames in the acti...

Tweeing - 1. First you'll have to make a new document and insert a keyframe in the timeline. D