Flash Actionscript: Tutorial #1
Flash is awesome for a lot of things. The important thing though, is that many Internet users have it installed already, and to view Flash content requires no further installation. Without Flash, YouTube wouldn’t exist. Here is my first tutorial on getting into Flash Actionscript. Like with any programming language, I’ll start with a simple ‘Hello World’ tutorial.
Open Adobe Flash, and create a new file. Choose the Text tool and draw a textbox in the middle of the screen. Make sure the Properties window is showing. If not select ‘Window’, ‘Properties’ from the menu. For the textbox type (drop-down) make sure ‘dynamic text’ is selected. Dynamic text can be changed via Actionscript but cannot be changed by user-input. In the <instance name> field type greeting
Now, create a new layer by selecting ‘Insert’, ‘Timeline’, ‘Layer’ from the menu. Rename the layer to actions and drag it to the top of the layer list. In the actions panel, input the code below. To open the actions panel select ‘Window’, ‘Actions’ from the menu.
// useful for debugging purposes
trace("Hello World");
// sets the textbox with the instance name of greeting to the specified string.
// _root references the stage
// .text accesses the text property of the textbox.
_root.greeting.text = "Hello World!";
To run your first Actionscript Program, select ‘File’, ‘Publish Preview’, ‘Flash’ from the menu.
Thats it.
