Firstly, thanks for your help. Here’s my situation: I’m trying to edit the code for a flash mp3 player, specifically the xspf music player located here http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/ (I’m using the slim version). I downloaded the latest release and got a compressed file containing a .as file, a .fla file, and a .swf file. I’ve got the player working fine on my site, what I’d like to do is insert code to make an external javascript function call (as described here: actionscript + javascript) when the player loads a song. I’ve edited the .as file but that doesn’t change anything, so I’m assuming I need to somehow re-compile. How do I do this? Also, I believe the actionscript is 2.0.
Thanks again. All comments are helpful as I’m lost with the amount of info available on flash, so many different version (flex, flex sdk, cs, etc, etc), and formats (.as, .fla, .swf)
Dan
Well, if you’re opening and editing the file using Flash, then what you need to do is go to File->Publish (something like that).
Your other questions:
Flex is for building Rich Internet Applications. It has your basic GUI controls and all that. It uses Actionscript MXML as its underlying languages.
Flash is more for creating animations and games. It does have some premade GUI components, but they don’t look as traditional as Flex’s.
The “CS” after Flash is “Creative Suite”, which is part of Adobe’s product line (with photoshop, dreamweaver, etc). The “CS” was added to it after Adobe bought Flash from Macromedia. If you see any versions of Flash without a CS after it (like flash MX), it is a very old version.
Your questions about file formats:
.as is a file that contains
Actionscript. This is the programming
language used in Flex and Flash.
.fla is a raw movie project file. This contains all of your graphical assets, as well as .as files and others.
.swf is a compiled movie. This is what a .fla turns into when you do the step I told you to do. This is what you download when you watch a flash video online.