Dealing with Data Types - Page 7

Movie Clip Methods

Finally here is a complete list of the object movie clip's methods. Looking through the list you notice some old favourites from Flash 4 like load movie, getURL and stop. You will also notice how many of the functions in the old actions are now a separate methods themselves, like load variables and removeMovieClip.

To learn more about these actions consult your flash help file or the Flashkit Flash 5 actionscripting tutorial section. And just remember, the concept of a method is very similar to an action in Flash 4 except that a method now belongs to an object.

If you're finding this hard to stomach don't stress! The only way to learn to program is the get in there and do it. The more you experiement the more you will develop an understanding of how the pieces of the puzzle come together. Also you're not the only person doing this, Flash 5 is a new product and thousand of designers are going through what you are. If you have questions or problems come to the flash kit discussion board and seek help. We've got tens of thousands of members and moderators who would love to help out.

That brings us to the end of the introduction to actionscripting data types. In this tutorial we have covered the primitive data types - strings, numbers and boolean - and discussed the reference data types and its predefined objects including the movie clip. The next tutorial in this series will be on coming to terms with variables in Flash 5 (coming soon). Best of luck!