Flash Description:
Macromedia's Flash is a very helpful tool to add some "bells and whistles" to your web page. The products created are considered movies and can be just presented or interactive.
Flash movies are interactive vector graphics and animation for web sites. Web designers use Flash to create navigation controls, animated logos, long-form animations with synchronized sound, and even complete, sensory-rich web sites. Flash movies are compact, vector graphics, so they download rapidly and scale to the viewer's screen size.
Millions of web users have received the Flash Player with their computers, browsers, or system software; others have downloaded it from the Macromedia web site. The Flash Player resides on the local computer, where it plays back movies in browsers or as stand-alone applications.
As you work in Flash, you create a movie by drawing or importing artwork, arranging it on the stage, and animating it with the Timeline. You make the movie interactive by making it respond to events and to change in specified ways. When the movie is complete, you export it as a Flash Player movie, embed it within an HTML page, and transfer it and the HTML page to a web server.
When creating and editing movies, you typically work in these key areas: the Stage, the rectangular area where the movie plays; the Timeline window, where graphics are animated over time; the Library window, where the reusable media assets of the movie, called symbols, are organized; and symbol-editing mode, where symbols are created and edited.