Macromedia Flash MX Intermediate Developer Course

Hello and welcome to the Virtual Training Company's Macromedia Flash MX Intermediate Developer course. My name is Eric and I will be your trainer as we explore the many uses of this powerful tool and how it impacts developers. This course is comprised of a series of videos ranging in length from 2 to 10 minutes. Each movie deals with a separate aspect of the Flash development environment. Ideally you will have the Flash MX program running at the same time as the training video. When we cover new material or concepts, I encourage you to pause the video and try it for yourself. The learning really sinks in when you yourself enter code or design with the components as I am showing you. Another terrific feature of these videos is the ability to rewind and play a section over again. If you missed a point the first time around, take it back as much as needed until you have got it. That's the beauty of self-paced education. These lessons have been designed to build on each other. So, if possible, please take the time to watch them in order from the beginning of the course to the end. Macromedia has begun creating two different worlds within the same development tool; that of designers and developers. When you start Flash MX for the first time, you'll be greeted with a welcome message and the option to set your application up for either designer or developer. As you can see here, Macromedia considers that designers create animations, user interfaces and original artwork; where as the developers create web applications and use advanced action script. The developer in this sense is one who primarily uses Flash as a visual web development tool, leveraging the power of the Flash player and the tremendous installed base. There is nearly 500 million installations to date. They use this to create visually stunning applications all accessible from a standard web browser. Developers also leverage the object oriented programming features of action script found in Flash MX to create reusable code objects, which can be shared with other developers, or with a team of developers to build cutting edge web applications. Macromedia is not abandoning their loyal following of designers however; as a matter of fact, many of the newest features, such as video and others, are what many designers have been asking for, for a long time. Macromedia has just found that there are two distinct ways to use their tool and they have begun to embrace both communities. While the focus of this course is targeted to developers, the Virtual Training Company has other fantastic titles available specifically for designers which will show you how to use the graphical abilities of Flash quite splendidly. If you have never used Flash MX before but know you want to create 21st century graphical web applications, then may I suggest starting with the Flash MX for designers course, which will give you a solid foundation from which to build upon, then study the action script for Flash MX course, also available from the Virtual Training Company; and finally turn to the developer series beginning with the intermediate title and then progressing to the advanced course. By following this simple road map, you'll find yourself with the same skills and abilities that others have spent years trying to acquire. By the end of this training course, you will know how to use each of the new reusable code modules, known as Flash MX components, learning many undocumented tricks along the way. You will see how developers code all the action script for their entire movie in an action script layer on the first frame of their time line. You will learn how to manipulate components and various other built in objects through api calls and behind the scenes manipulations in your code. I will also show you how to use a Flash cookie to store persistent data between sessions and even how to share that data with other movies you may have distributed throughout your website. And finally, we'll look ahead to where all this new knowledge can take you and where the industry is headed. The future looks bright for action script developers and so I thank you for choosing this title and I trust that you will enjoy the experience.