Macromedia Flash – Test Your Progress

To finish, you can test your document in Flash. This tests the SWF file in Flash Player. For example, you can see how your code works in Flash Player, see how animations play on the Timeline, test user interactivity, and more. It’s much faster than uploading your work to a server each time you want to see the SWF file in action:

1. Select Control > Test Movie from the main menu.

   The test environment opens and plays your document in Flash Player. You can now see the compiled SWF file version of your FLA document. You will often use the Test Movie command to view your progress when you work on a FLA file.

2. Click the banner.fla document tab (Windows) or the SWF file’s close button (Macintosh) to return to the authoring environment.
3. Find the folder on your hard drive where you saved banner.fla at the beginning of this tutorial.

When you open this folder, you should see an additional SWF file called banner.swf. This is the compiled version of the banner.fla document. When you want to create a finished version of your file to upload, you’ll want to make additional publish settings in Flash before you compile your SWF file. You’ll look at these settings in Part 3 of this tutorial.

Macromedia Flash – Where to Go from Here

In a very short period of time, you have set up a FLA document, imported and arranged assets in a FLA file, created and modified layers, and tested a SWF file. You’re on your way to creating a banner in Flash so you can embed it in an HTML page using Dreamweaver. In Parts 2 and 3 of this tutorial, you will create and modify symbols, create an animation, add some simple ActionScript for a button that opens a web page, and add the banner to a website.

To see the completed file for this part of the tutorial, find banner_pt1.fla in the folder of source files that accompanies this tutorial.

To continue on to Part 2, see Using Flash for the First Time – Part 2: Adding Symbols, Animation, and ActionScript.