Baby Steps : Getting Started in Flash

This is a tutorial for flash 4. A flash 5 version will be published shortly.

You've heard about it, you like the sound it makes, you like the way it moves and you've been really impressed by the tutorials BUT how exactly do you start using Flash? Well first you have to understand how flash works. Think of it as a cartoon and you, the designer, are the cartoon artist who has to draw each frame. (Flash helps you here, you don't have to draw every frame.) In fact, if you want to animate a symbol all you have to do is specify what the starting frame will look like and the ending frame and let flash do the rest (all the frames in between). But before you can do any of that, you should do a few things: