Megan — Sat, 25 May 2002 15:33:23 +0000

Macromedia Fireworks 4 - for creating web graphics. The TWF design was done in FW, for example. You can also do lots of fancy buttons and styling and things like that. If you're looking to create raster-styled buttons and import them into Flash, FW is what you'd want to use. FW was created specifically for creating web graphics so its really good for navbars, buttons, logos, and things like that.
Macromedia Director Shockwave Studio 8 - another animation program with a much longer history than Flash; more suited to CD-ROM based applications than the web.
Macromedia Extension Manager This is just used to take care of all the extensions macromedia lets you download for their vaious programs (I'm assuming so, anyway... haven't used it myself)
Adobe GoLive! For creating web pages, but be careful with this one. In my experience it's really easy to write bad code in GoLive if you don't know what you're doing.
Adobe Illustrator - for complex vector drawings

Suzanne — Sat, 25 May 2002 02:26:00 +0000

if you want vector images to import into Flash, you'll want something that can save as .ai files -- Illustrator, Draw types. So, er, Illustrator in your case. Illustrator is a vector graphics program (much different than raster or bitmap applications).

ianrules — Sat, 25 May 2002 02:22:02 +0000

I have the following and ONLY the following programs, and with the exception of Dreamweaver and flash, I don't know what they do:

macromedia dreamweaver UltraDev
Macromedia Flash 5
Macromedia Fireworks 4
Macromedia Director Shockwave Studio 8
Macromedia Extension Manager
Adobe GoLive!
Adobe Illustrator
Micrografx Picture Pulisher 8

Now for my actual questions.

1. What the hell do all those programs do? I have all of them and I have no clue what they are for. I know what flash, picture publisher, and dreamweaver are for, but thats it.

2. Out of all the graphics programs there, which is the best for creating the basic graphics that I can later import to flash? I'm really only using flash for navigation and small animations like logos and stuff. so what is the best graphics program, out of the ones listed, for creating navigational images and buttons and stuff to import to flash?

shecky — Wed, 22 May 2002 02:44:02 +0000

Kirupa.com
Macromedia
FlashKit

and about a thousand others. goto Google and search for "flash free tutorial"

Megan — Wed, 22 May 2002 02:23:41 +0000

Sometimes you can do some interesting stuff with vector graphics but if you want to do any kind of raster effects you'll have to do them in a separate raster program (photoshop or whatever). Just watch your file sizes with this - with flash every little bit counts

zollet — Tue, 21 May 2002 22:12:16 +0000

Ian,

designsbymark.com is a good website too. It's been a long time since I visited it, they have changed the site A LOT since!

ianrules — Tue, 21 May 2002 21:44:42 +0000

Thanks, now I need help for creating good buttons and stuff. because though flash is a great program, it lags in the actual creation of an image IMO.

Megan — Thu, 16 May 2002 19:58:57 +0000

Have you tried the built in lessons under the Help menu? That's a good starting point. http://www.flashkit.com also has a lot of good tutorials.

The Webmistress — Thu, 16 May 2002 19:33:45 +0000

http://were-here.com/forum/tutorials/index.shtml have some good tutorials and is also a forum more or less dedicated to flash.