When you first open Flash^R, you will see a Welcome screen which contains many options for taking your first steps with Flash Professional. The screen has three columns. Let's see what kind of help we can find.

Flash CS6 Welcome Screen

The far right Learn column contains links to online articles, tutorials and videos by Adobe. Each link will take you to content grouped under a specific topic such as Flash Symbols or ActionScript. At the bottom of this column next to the Flash icon is a message area where Adobe can send messages related to the Flash software. Check back occasionally to see what's new.

The center Create New column contains options for starting a new project. Each option will start a new file containing the basic settings for that type of project. For example, when creating web-based projects, you will want to start with a new ActionScript 3 file, which will have document settings for publishing for the web and the Flash Player. For mobile projects, the AIR options will create a starting file with document settings for the standard mobile devices.

More advanced developers can start a large Flash Project containing many files. As you work on these large projects, you can use the other links to create new supporting files such as ActionScript, Flash JavaScript, AS 3 Class and Interface files. The Extend area under this column will take you to the Adobe Marketplace and Exchange website, where you can find many ways to extend the Flash software. The extras on the Exchange website are create by Adobe and also by other Flash developers. Most of the extras are free and some are offered at a small price.

If you want a little help getting your project off the ground, you can start with one of the project templates from the left column entitled Create from Template. Choosing one of these options will open the New from Template dialog box, where you can choose from many prebuilt templates. The templates are grouped by type. We will take a look at these templates more closely in a later tutorial.

Advertising
AIR for Android
Animation
Banners
Media Playback
Presentations
Sample Files

Under this column is the Open a Recent Item list of the most recent files you have opened into Flash. This is a great time saver. If you need to work on a project or file not listed here, you can use the Open option to open the file browser.

At the very bottom, you can check the box to tell Flash not to show this Welcome screen when the program opens in the future. To toggle the Welcome screen back on, choose Show Welcome Screen in the Flash Preferences dialog box. On the Mac, click Flash - Preferences from the Menubar. On Windows click Edit - Preferences.

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