thinking in flash

How well do you guys know Flash? Everything on there is done in Flash. I'm just wondering how much "programability" Flash offers. Cause it looks quite compilicated to me.

i used to do quite some stuff in flash long back. quite some programming also. one very good site for flash resources is flashkit.com. did a few projects which gave me a lot of satisfaction. there was a time when i was much better at flash than at java actually!!.

i guess i was comfortable with flash because i thought of it in a more OOP way. flash == OOPS with images. i'll explain further.

there are a few object types. movie and button are the most important. when you create a movie or button symbol you are in effect extending the basic classes to create your own. the symbols you put on stage are also just called instances. you also have to give instance names to whatever instances you put on stage. the one in the library is the extended class.

there are some super methods/variables you have when you extend the movie or button classes. these are the api calls you can make to manipulate your instances. stuff like x._alpha etc. the entire api is very well documented in flash help.

another very important part in flash is handling events. buttons and movie instances also have associated events, which you can trap and use. stuff like
on (press){
getUrl("products/index_warli.html","_self");
}
for buttons. basically event handlers/delegates whatever.

in programs you start from a main and flow through a program and create instances, call methods etc. in flash you flow through the frames. simply stop(); at a particular frame, and jump with gotoAndPlay(5); on some event etc to move through the animation.

i would say think partly OOP!!