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Working in Flash overview

Macromedia Flash MX movies are graphics, text, animation, and applications for Web sites. They consist primarily of vector graphics, but they can also contain imported video, bitmap graphics, and sounds. Flash movies can incorporate interactivity to permit input from viewers, and you can create nonlinear movies that can interact with other Web applications. 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 use compact vector graphics, so they download rapidly and scale to the viewer's screen size.

You've probably watched and interacted with Flash movies on many Web sites. 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. Viewing a Flash movie on the Flash Player is similar to viewing a DVD on a DVD player—the Flash Player is the device used to display the movies you create in the Flash authoring application.

Flash documents, which have the .fla filename extension, contain all the information required to develop, design, and test interactive content. Flash documents are not the movies the Flash Player displays. Instead, you publish your FLA documents as Flash movies, which have the .swf filename extension and contain only the information needed to display the movie.

For an interactive introduction to Flash, choose Help > Lessons > Getting Started with Flash.