Adobe Flash —

Test the application

To finish, you can test your document using Flash. Doing so tests the SWF file in Flash Player. For example, you can see how your code works in Flash Player, 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 file. You will often use the Test Movie command to view your progress when you work on an FLA file.
2.
Click the close button of the window that contains the SWF file to return to the authoring environment.

Find the folder on your hard disk where you saved banner.fla at the beginning of this tutorial in "Creating a new document".

When you open this folder, you should see an additional SWF file called banner.swf. This is the compiled version of the banner.fla file. 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 ("Basic Tasks: Creating a banner, Part 3") of this tutorial.

Summary

Congratulations for completing your first step of creating a banner in Flash. You used the Flash authoring tool to create a new document, add assets, and manipulate the file using a variety of tools.

In a very short period of time, you learned how to use the Flash workspace to accomplish the following tasks:

  • Set up a FLA file.

  • Imported assets into the FLA file.

  • Arrange assets in a FLA file.

  • Create and modify layers.

  • Test 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 the next two parts 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 continue building this application, go to the next part of this tutorial: "Basic Tasks: Creating a banner, Part 2".