Flash Journalism

	Lesson 5
	Making Buttons Do Things

To include interactivity in a Flash movie, you need to allow the users to make choices. If they can’t choose what they want, they can only watch or read what’s already on the screen. Most Web pages supply choices via hypertext links—click on a link, and something happens (usually you go to a different Web page). You can make hypertext links in Flash too (although in most cases, you wouldn’t want your users to leave the Flash movie)—but more often, Flash movies supply choices via buttons.

In Lesson 4 you learned how to make buttons, but not how to make buttons work. That’s the subject of this lesson. Making buttons work requires the use of ActionScript, but not very much; often one line of script is enough ...