Subtitles of the Movie

Another great new feature that you'll find in Flash MX is the whole concept of shared libraries. Shared libraries really have two distinct forms; either in the run time or you'll package up sounds such as your background music, logos that you use throughout your site, and other graphics that may be large. What you'll do is you'll package all these into one swf file that is earmarked for being a shared library and that gets uploaded to your website. When the user first downloads the background music for instance, it is downloaded to their computer one time. From that point forward every reference you make to it from your website it does not have to reload it again and again and again it just references the file that's already been downloaded. This saves not only time but also improves the performance and experience for your users. So runtime libraries are very important. We are not going to go into runtime libraries here because that was covered well in our sister title, which is Flash MX for Designers, also available from VTC. The other aspect that you have at your disposal is shared library assets for author time. Author time sharing allows you to keep track of symbols in a single file. This can be handy for button libraries, audio clip libraries, logos, even action script routines. Macromedia ships with Flash MX three different shared libraries known as "common libraries." In this example we have buttons, learning interactions and sounds. These libraries provide us with an example of how you can build your own shared libraries using buttons, sounds or graphics or what have you. Let's take a look at the buttons library and see what I mean by this. You can see when the panel opens that Macromedia has provided different types of buttons, their arcade buttons, circle buttons, components and so on. If you double click on the first folder you can see that Macromedia has included several different colors of their basic arcade style button that may not be applicable to your situation; you may rather look at circle buttons, with the arrows, next buttons, previous. The point to be made here is the fact that you could build your own libraries of any common graphics or sounds or other components, including action script routines, that you want to reuse over and over in your projects. Where shared libraries really shine however is in a team development environment. By using shared libraries you can easily assign a specific library to a single developer, such as a developer that works on the graphics for buttons; another library that is on the logo team; the idea being that each of these libraries can be worked on independently but merged into your final web design. The use of shared libraries for development purposes will be covered in a later chapter in this tutorial f shared libraries for development purposes will be covered in a later chapter in this tutorial