In our featured article this week, learn how to use Macromedia's new Flash 2.0. Flash is an easy to use multimedia animation tool that has become quite popular. This first installment of a two-part illustrated Flash tutorial takes you step by step through creating a banner ad with animated text and graphics. Flash can output your animation in many formats, including GIF89a, Flash, and Java. The Flash format is vector-based, which offers many advantages over bitmapped graphics.
Flash animations are very compact, zoomable with no loss in quality, and they antialias on the fly.
The flash player itself is also compact, around 110K in size. By Amy Cowen. In our last lesson we created a convincing photorealistic scene, complete with modeled fruit and glass beaker. This time we look into surfacing the individual objects. By Robert Polevoi.