Flash 8: The Missing Manual

Chapter 11. Interacting with Your Audience

Chapter 9 introduced you to actions and behaviors, both of which let your audience interact with your animation by pushing buttons, dragging images, typing in text, and so on. In this chapter, you see examples of common actions and behaviors that you can adapt to fit your own project. Think of them as recipes. You’ll find out how to insert dynamic text into an animation at runtime, how to capture the information your audience types into a text field, how to create rollovers, how to add actions to buttons and Flash components, and more.

Note

For more examples of actions, check out Chapter 10.

Dynamic Text

Dynamic text is text that you insert into your animation at runtime, when the animation plays on your audience’s computer (as opposed to when you create the animation).

Dynamic text’s great for adding late-breaking updates to your animation: Think sports scores, weather reports, and news headlines. Dynamic text is also a good way to incorporate customized text into your animation without having to go to all the trouble of reworking the animation itself. For example, using dynamic text, you can create a single, basic animation and switch out the header text at runtime so that three different clients can play the same animation and see three different messages (Figure 11-1).

Loading dynamic text into your animation requires a dynamic text box (you can think of it as a placeholder), some data (in this case, it’s a text file, but you could also ...