Flash glossary: Buttons
There are three types of symbols in Adobe Flash Professional: buttons, graphics, and movie clips. Button symbols enable you to add interactivity to your projects, including rollover and disjointed rollover effects, in addition to triggering functions. There are two parts of a button's behavior: the first is how the button itself behaves visually when rolled over or clicked; the second is what happens in the Flash file when the button is clicked.
Most buttons are designed with different Up, Down, and Over states. These states allow the button to look different when the user hovers the cursor over the button and when user clicks the button.
Buttons in Flash always require ActionScript to cause mouse events (such as mouseover or onclick) to trigger actions and run functions. In order to hook up buttons to the corresponding ActionScript, you must assign an instance name to button instances on the Stage using the Property inspector.
There are several different ways of creating buttons. Choose from the following:
- Button symbols
- Movie Clip symbols
- ActionScript 3 Button components
- ActionScript 2 Button components
To learn more about working with buttons, see Creating buttons in the Flash documentation.
Explore the anatomy of a button and learn various ways to build custom buttons by reading Creating buttons in Flash Professional, which provides sample files and simple exercises ranging from beginning to intermediate skill levels.
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