Multimedia Design: Portfolio: Flash Show Me's

he Flash Show Me’s were created and implemented to demonstrate some of the features of Flash 2.0, and to provide examples of best practices in creating Flash files. They were shipped with the product as a part of the Help documentation. Flash was very limited in its feature set at this time, and required a lot of workarounds to fit into a tutorial mode. For example, it wasn’t possible to make a new layer of graphics appear over an existing scene and have it stick – you could make it appear on a mouse down, but it would have to disappear on a mouse up, a severe limitation that was fixed in Flash 3.0. To get around it, we put the tutorial text in the .fla file and put up a note to read it when you clicked on a (!) icon in the .swf file.

This incorporation of Flash into the help system was one of the first help systems to include interactive animated media.