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Adding Behaviors to Buttons (Continued)

The behavior appears in the Behaviors panel:

Notice that if you click inside the Event column, a menu appears, letting you select a different mouse event to apply the behavior to:

6. To see how the button works, add a new keyframe (F6) to frame 3. Remember, the behavior moves the playhead to frame 3 when the user clicks the button.

7. With frame 3 selected, use the Text tool to add the word “Hello” to the Stage:

8. Flash will automatically progress through the movie, making the button essentially useless, since “Hello” will quickly appear as soon as the playhead reaches frame 3, unless we tell Flash not to play the movie when it loads. To do so, add a new layer called “Actions” and, with the first frame of that layer selected, open the Actions panel. Add the stop() action, just as we did to the last frame of our motion tween earlier:

9. The stop() action is used frequently throughout a movie to control the flow of events, from one animation to another. In a user-driven Flash movie, stop() will appear in many places to simulate traditional application screens, rather than the constant motion of animation. So far, we’ve added a stop() action to the beginning of the movie, so Flash will wait for the user to do something before moving through the Timeline. But once it starts moving, it’s going to keep going unless we add another stop() action to the last frame, the one with the “Hello” text. Without a stop() action here, “Hello” will appear and quickly disappear as soon as the user clicks the button, because the playhead will automatically move back to frame 1 in the Timeline, where the text does not appear.