AGI Creative Team - Adobe Flash Professional CS6 Digital Classroom

Contents

Starting Up

About the Flash Professional CS6 Digital Classroom

Adobe Flash Professional CS6 is used to create and deliver interactive content. Adobe Flash Professional CS6 is the authoring environment for creating rich, interactive content and advertisements for digital, web delivery.

The Adobe Flash Professional CS6 Digital Classroom helps you to understand these capabilities and to get the most out of your software so that you can get up-and-running right away. You can work through all the lessons in this book, or complete only specific lessons. Each lesson includes detailed, step-by-step instructions, along with lesson files, useful background information, and video tutorials.

Adobe Flash Professional CS6 Digital Classroom is like having your own expert instructor guiding you through each lesson while you work at your own pace. This book includes 15 self-paced lessons that let you discover essential skills, explore new ones, and understand capabilities that will save you time. Youll be productive right away with real-world exercises and simple explanations. Each lesson includes step-by-step instructions, lesson files, and video tutorials, all of which are available on the Digital Classroom website: www.digitalclassroombooks.com/epub/flashcs6 . The Flash Professional CS6 Digital Classroom lessons are developed by the same team of Adobe Certified Experts and Flash professionals who have created many of the official training titles for Adobe Systems.

Prerequisites

Before you start the Adobe Flash Professional CS6 Digital Classroom lessons, you should have a working knowledge of your computer and its operating system. You should know how to use the directory system of your computer so that you can navigate through folders. You also need to understand how to locate, save, and open files, and you should also know how to use your mouse to access menus and commands.

Before starting the lesson files in the Adobe Flash Professional CS6 Digital Classroom , make sure that you have installed Adobe Flash Professional CS6. The software is sold separately, and is not included with this book. You may use the free 30-day trial version of Adobe Flash Professional CS6 available at the adobe.com website, subject to the terms of its license agreement.

System requirements

Before starting the lessons in the Adobe Flash Professional CS6 Digital Classroom , make sure that your computer is equipped for running Adobe Flash Professional CS6, which you must purchase separately. The minimum system requirements for your computer to effectively use the software are listed on the following page and you can find the most current system requirements at http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/tech-specs.html .

Windows

Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor

Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 3 or Windows 7

2 GB of RAM (3 GB recommended)

3.5 GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on removable flash-based storage devices)

1024768 display (1280800 recommended)

Java Runtime Environment 1.6 (included)

QuickTime 7.6.6 software required for multimedia features

Some features in Adobe Bridge rely on a DirectX 9capable graphics card with at least 64 MB of VRAM

Broadband Internet connection required for online services

Mac OS

Multicore Intel processor

Mac OS X v10.6 or v10.7

2 GB of RAM (3 GB recommended)

4 GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system or on removable flash-based storage devices)

1024768 display (1280800 recommended)

Java Runtime Environment 1.6

QuickTime 7.6.6 software required for multimedia features

Broadband Internet connection required for online services

Starting Adobe Flash Professional CS6

As with most software, Adobe Flash Professional CS6 is launched by locating the application in your Programs folder (Windows) or Applications folder (Mac OS). If you are not familiar with starting the program, follow these steps to start the Adobe Flash Professional CS6 application:

Windows

Choose Start > All Programs > Adobe Flash Professional CS6.

Close the Welcome Screen when it appears. You are now ready to use Adobe Flash Professional CS6.

Mac OS

Open the Applications folder, and then open the Adobe Flash CS6 folder.

Double-click on the Adobe Flash CS6 application icon.

Close the Welcome Screen when it appears. You are now ready to use Adobe Flash Professional CS6.

Menus and commands are identified throughout the book by using the greater-than symbol (>). For example, the command to print a document appears as File > Print.

Resetting the Flash workspace

To make certain that your panels and working environment are consistent, you should reset your workspace at the start of each lesson. To reset your workspace, choose Window > Workspace > Reset Essentials.

Loading lesson files

The Adobe Flash Professional CS6 Digital Classroom includes files that accompany the exercises for each of the lessons. These files are available for download at www.digitalclassroombooks.com/epub/flashcs6 . You may download all the lessons at one time or you may choose to download and work with specific lessons.

For each lesson in the book, the files are referenced by the name of each file. The exact location of each file on your computer is not used, as you may have placed the files in a unique location on your hard drive. We suggest placing the lesson files in the My Documents folder (Windows) or at the top level of your hard drive (Mac OS), or on your desktop for easy access.

Downloading and copying the lesson files to your hard drive:

Use your web browser, navigate to www.digitalclassroombooks.com/epub/flashcs6 . Follow the instructions on the web page to download the lesson files to your computer.

On your computer desktop, navigate to the location where you downloaded the files and right-click (Windows) the .zip file you downloaded, then choose Extract All or double-click on the .zip file (Mac OS).

Working with the video tutorials

The www.digitalclassroombooks.com/epub/flashcs6 site provides Adobe Flash CS6 Digital Classroom book readers with video tutorials that enhance the content of this book. The videos use the popular Silverlight player for viewing on your desktop or notebook computer, or use iPad-compatible video if you are using an iPad to read an electronic version of this book. Most other ePub devices are not optimized for playing video, and you should use a notebook, desktop, or tablet computer for viewing the video tutorials if you are using a dedicated e-reader such as a nook, Kindle, kobo, or Sony e-reader. An internet connection is necessary for viewing the supplemental video files.

The videos enhance your learning as key concepts and instructions are discussed by the books authors. The video tutorials supplement the books contents, and do not replace the book. They are not intended to cover every item discussed in the book, but will help you gain a better or more clear understanding of topics discussed in many lessons of the book.

Hosting Your Flash content and websites

While you can work on everything in this book using only your computer, you will eventually want to post your Flash content to the Web and create sites to share with the world. To do this, you will need to place your website files on a web server, which is a computer that is persistently connected to the Internet and designed to handle multiple users at once.