Hey, I am brand new to Flash and my work called me in and made me change our site so that it is a little more animated. So here I am. I have used Flash, but never got into Action Script, so here is my situation:
I have a series of buttons (for a homepage) and I need the buttons to animate when there is a mouse over, and I need them to link to other sites. Can someone show me how this will look or how I can accomplish this?
-Thor
Did you try searching on the internet?
A good tip: Don’t use flash. Some people have all .swf files adblocked or just don’t have the plugin installed. Plus, html + images is much cleaner IMO.
<edit>Plus, flash is at least as annoying as bouncing gif smilies or the like. Ugh.</edit>
I second that…
DHTML/CSS solutions abound. Scan this thread for some good links to menu solutions. Or google for “Suckerfish Dropdowns”. Definitely stay away from Flash for site navigation!
Love to help but making a buttons with mouseovers in Flash is kind of an involved process. Have you tried the Visual QuickProject books?
Animate on mouse-over is quite simple. Just make button, and put a movie clip in the “Over” frame. There you have it, animated mouse-over. Mouse-out is far more difficult, though.
Link to other sites, just copy this into the actions part of your button:
on (release) {
getURL ("http://url", "_parent");
}
(Replace “http://url” with your URL, and “_parent” if need be. You could also just remove ‘, “_parent”’)
Edit: Made an example file if you need it.
SWF file
FLA file
Thanks Jeeves, I just learnt something new today. 
Oops, I forgot, people on Blender dispise Flash. Well, get over it, technology demands something better than CSS, and my work is convinced it is Flash. All of our buttons ect., are .swf, and they want to keep the format. If I wanted to use a brick to make a house, I would, but I hear they invented cement.
Now I equip my shield of criticism +2 to nerd rantings…
-Thor
The flash navigation on http://weebl.jolt.co.uk/ is IMO as far as you can take it. It’s very minimalistic and could have been done using gifs. I think there isn’t much beyond that point. Just my 2 cents.
If memory serves me right, you need both ;).
I have mixed feelings about flash:
It’s good because it’s cross-platform, easy to make animations and uses less CPU for animations than anything else. Flash sites almost always look better than other sites. You can get animated images at higher than 256 colours (unlike GIF). Also, you might have to make a normal version anyway - most sites offer non-flash alternatives.
It’s bad because it uses proprietary software and it’s harder to maintain as you have to edit the entire flash file every time. Also, you might not be able to reach Linux PPC users as they don’t have a suitable flash player yet. Google won’t index your page either.
If Java Applets were better e.g. didn’t take so much time to initialize, I don’t think Flash would be around. Since it’s not, I don’t think you can get the quality of flash with other methods.
Now, if you are limiting yourself to one feature like rollover buttons, don’t even bother with flash. My brother needed a site done with a scrolling news item and he did it in flash but the client couldn’t update the news themselves so I wrote a Javascript scroller that actually worked better and scrolled an html page that they could put images onto.
I would only use flash if I was doing a lot of animation.
If you need help with Flash, I would start here:
Flash is it’s own worst enemy, problem is it’s so easy to use that people with no sense of design end up making rubbish, pretty much all of the problems people have described her are due to a lack of user knowledge rather than flash being bad. used properly flash is an awesome tool, i’d like to see you do this in java
Flash is indeed a good tool to use for what its good at: a sophistcated (potentially in the right hands, anyway) method of communicating static (non-changing) information. But when you want to convey dynamic data, such as what this very forum conveys, then flash is far from appropriate.
I would say that mixing the two mediums (flash / XHTML) is not necessarily a good practice, and that’s probably the point most are trying to make here (at least I was…). If you do flash, go exclusively flash, but if all you need is site navigation for an HTML-based site, then there are better solutions out there…
Making blanket statements about how outdated all other technologies are is, unfortunately, clearly demonstrating your own sad lack of understanding about the vast array of communication technologies available on the net today, as well as the wide variety of their uses and capabilities. Its a bit like saying Blender is the new replacement for all computer software everywhere. Hmmm… would that it were so.
Flash is actually capable of displaying dynamic data quite happily, it uses xml, a friend of mine made a diary app made entirely in flash that used a database, and i have made a simple forum app in the past, so it can be done.
Also, Flash is perfectly fine for making a site navigation and using html for the rest, you can create some real interesting menus for an otherwise standard site, because sometimes you want the rest of the site to be standard
Thanks for the links! I showed my boss my the CSS example first and pleaded he let me stick with it, but he’s wanting something a little more animated. And with the brick analogy, don’t dig too deep into it, I’m not a contractor, I have no idea how to make a house, I just used it for analogies sake!
Thanks again,
-Thor
Interesting! Learn som’thin’ new every day. Just wish I knew how to do that myself (and could afford the tools…)
Just have to agree to disagree on this one… 
OnGodsGreen: no offense meant on the earlier comments… I’m usually pretty grumpy in the mornings… sorry.