Chapter 9. Adding Interactivity

Although Flash is a great platform for delivering linear animations, linear animations represent just a small fraction of the many possibilities for the types of content you can deliver using Flash. Linear animations might not require any user interaction. But most types of Flash content do.

Buttons are one of the primary ways in which users can interact with your Flash movies. Using buttons, you can allow users to cause actions to occur by rolling over buttons, clicking on buttons, and other similar types of events. You can use both button symbols and movie clip symbols as buttons in your Flash applications. This chapter explains the advantages and disadvantages of both.

Buttons are the basic building blocks of user interaction mechanisms in Flash. In addition, you can build specialized buttons to use as menus, and you can use specialized controls such as dials and sliders. Each of those topics is discussed in this chapter as well.

Users can also interact with Flash using the mouse and keyboard. This chapter shows you how to apply custom mouse cursorseven interactive cursors. And you'll also read about how to detect keyboard activity.

There are additional ways in which users can interact with Flash applications. Some of those topics are not discussed in this chapter because they have chapters dedicated to them already. You can read more about using text for interactivity (links, user input, and so on) in Chapters 7 and 8. Additionally, Flash has standard UI components that you can use for building user input forms and navigation controls. Those components are discussed in more detail in Chapters 13 and 14.