Interactive Menu Demonstration

To set up a similar menu in Flash, set up your timeline and buttons in flash in the following manner:

The scripts layer has three frame scripts: they merely stop the play of the movie for each frame, while other scripts tell the play head to go to frames on which the interactive sub-menus are placed. The blue band is level one, the swatch twice as wide and having a green and a red stripe is level two, and level three consists of the two menus that show based upon a rollover of one of the stripes in level two.

Level one is "start" which spans the entire duration. The play head plays when the movie is started and stops at two so that only the start button is visible (the other parts of the menu are not visible until we get to frames three, four, and five).

Proceeding down the layer window, we have level two, the maroon and olive buttons in the middle. These buttons span frame three (its appearance with the rollover of the start button (the light blue button with olive text), frame four (its continued appearance along with Level3One), and frame five (its continued appearance along with Level3Two).

Level3One is shown below, and is only present in frame four. Every time I mouse over the green button in level2, the play head jumps to frame four where the entire menu is visible except for Level3Two.

Similarly upon rollover of the red button, the Level3Two is visible along with the rest of the menu. The frame five in which it is only visible encapsulates the red, green, and red stripes, each button instances with their own scripting possibilities. The frame acts as a code construct for the three buttons, containing them in the computer's mathematical language.

The bottom, largest layer is a large invisible button that helps to close the menus when the user mouses outside of them, and act as an area not on a higher level menu that would cause the submenu to pop up again.

The Procedures: Levels one and two each have events associated with them: when a user mouses over the buttons in these layers, sub-menus appear (the mechanism is a goto frame script).

2) This allows the sub-submenu to appear when the users mouses back over the higher level button from the middle submenu, since it goes to frame four or five--and both must have a script that deals with level two's visibility which is in not only four and five, but in three too.

3) When the mouse moves in from the third level to the first level, there is a goto script in the first level that moves the playhead to before frame three. The key to this functionality is the use of a single frame for the objects (the large invisible button, and the start menu) that spans more than one frame, so that its scripts will be applied to the other buttons in all of those frames. You may also retrieve the current frame before and after the playhead jumps to the submenu, thereby potentially doing away with the invisible button (only advanced flash users need go here!).

On Symbols: When we use symbols in Flash, we are encapsulating numerical sources. Encapsulation in computer programming is a term for data boundaries--domains for the scope of functions attributed to computer code snippets. So let us say that you had a picture of a famous artist, drawn using the drawing tools in flash. There are three components which go into the visual image on the screen: the mathematical description or source, the instructions on how to draw the image from the mathematical description, and the visuals themselves.

The mathematical description encapsulates or describes through being a container for an object. This sounds abstract, but it is really only a notion of numerical representation and simulation. How would you go about modeling events, actions and animation, through numbers?

There are two dimensions: what machines read, and what humans experience, although what machines read, humans can also experience or decipher. Computer programs, in order to be flexible need to be able to separate data from procedures. Why? We need to be able to describe processes or behaviors into which we can then plug data. We do this when we copy elements in Flash or any other program, where the behavior is "copy".

Imagine if you had to write a new program every time you wanted to copy something different. The computer would have no value as a tool. The separation of data from procedures removes this obstacle.

In Flash, a symbol is visual, but it constitutes a pattern for copies. The notion of an instance is important here: an object has a description that can be instanced, or in other words, data can be represented.