This week’s cooltopic:
Flash MX
Article by:The KROW
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“Rating That Film” (con’t)
Okay, so our Quiz is set up for users to answer a series of questions. And, during the quiz we want them to be able to check their answers to the questions, plus know their answer rate at the end of the Quiz.
Now we may be treading water here, but at least we’re not in over our heads! And, this new Flash has seen to it that they don’t leave us stranded in the middle of this project. They have cleverly added step-by-step instruction right in the movie. And I mean... IN the movie (these don’t show when you publish the pages). Look:
What the instructions are telling us is, this Quiz is already set up to track to an learning management system. You don’t have to do anything to it other than modify the interaction parameters and then publish the movie!
So, once you’ve published the movie, you end up with something like this:
(If you cannot see the quiz in the popup then you may need to install the Flash player. You can do so from here.)
“No Need To Jump Ship!”
About now I would have to say congratulations to all of you for officially getting your sea legs!
But, if you’re thinking ahead, you probably have one last question about the Quiz in Flash MX. It’s about that “publish” part.
This is actually a common question among Fusion users. It gets a little sticky trying to figure out how to:
- Get Flash to publish the movie in the first place
- Get those published Flash files into Fusion
Well, you’re in luck. This is an easy step too. When you have your Quiz the way you want, first check out your publishing preferences in Flash. Then publish the files to a directory you’ll remember. You will see in that directory all the files Flash created to get your movie to work. But, since you’re working in Fusion, you don’t need *all* the files Flash just made (i.e., the html files). All you need is the final “.swf” (and possibly any images if you used them).
In Fusion, open the page you want the movie to be placed. Now, simply drop the “Media:Plug-In” button on the page (it looks like a blue puzzle piece in Fusion MX). In the popup window, browse to the directory where you just saved your Flash Quiz movie and select it. Then publish your Fusion site as you normally do, and it’s done! You can even integrate the Quiz or movie with coolmaps components like we did here on this page (we used PopRocket).
It’s *really* nice to see all these great software programs finally starting to gel together... and that’s no bucket of worms! :-D
Flash MX is one of The KROW’s top 10 programs for any webbies tool box!
Enjoy, and until next time...have fun and happy webbing!
