No Flash in the Pan
By Josh Smith
DHTML doesn't really rise to the challenge for developers who want to produce all-singing, all-dancing Web sites. Fortunately a savior comes in the form of Flash 4, the latest incarnation of Macromedia's high-impact vector animation tool.
This version is stable and well defined, and has a development environment that makes HTML text editors look positively antiquated. Furthermore, a recent survey by NPD Online Research (www.npd.com) indicates that 87 percent of Web users have some version of the Flash plug-in installed—a market penetration suggesting that Flash deserves a place in every Web designer's toolbox.
Application Basics
Flash's interface has changed little from previous versions. It comprises four main elements: the stage, the timeline, the library window, and the toolbox. The stage is a canvas where the actual hands-on movie editing takes place. You can drag objects from the library window and modify them using the toolbox options to create your animated masterpieces. The timeline lets you move from frame to frame, load the content of each time-slice for editing, and specify the chronology of individual objects to be altered.
The program has the standard array of toolbox features, as well as various devices for scaling, rotating, and contorting the vector images.
