Flash Menus

Abstract

Now its time to turn our attention to a possibly slightly less obvious, but still equally valid menu creation toolset — Flash. In this chapter, we will first be looking at Flash-specific usability issues, and how to overcome some of these, as well as having a brief discussion of standard Flash navigation concepts, such as the humble Flash button. Finally, we will go through a sprawling three-level menu system — the levels are as follows:

• Level 1 — A dynamic animated Flash menu, all contained within one. fla file.

• Level 2 — The same menu system, only the menu entries are pulled in from an XML file, so you only need to change the XML to update the menu.

• Level 3 — The same menu system again — this time however, the menu entries are stored in a MySQL database, dynamically pulled out and converted to XML using PHP, and imported into Flash.