This chapter covers creating your own Flash animations for your blog. The focus here is on animating in the Flash timeline. The lessons here are to help you with the fundamentals of Flash animation and give you a jump start on the process.
Using symbols is an important part of animating in Flash. There are three different types of symbols: graphic symbols, buttons, and movie clips. All symbols in Flash have some sort of timeline:
The timeline of a graphic symbol allows multiple layers to exist in the same symbol, but not animation. Graphic symbols hold static information.
A button has a timeline that is not time-based, but user-based. This means that the button symbol instance changes based on what the user does with their mouse, rather than on time passing. A button symbol can hold graphic symbol instances and movie clip symbol instances as well as multiple layers.
A movie clip symbol has a robust timeline that accommodates multiple layers as well as animations that happen...