Getting back to the mighty SWFTools package, I'm discovering that it's all you really need!

The compiler of this handy toolkit is "swfc", and it has a sort-of manual here. I say "sort of" because it's mostly examples. The examples are plentiful, however, and there's even more here. Pretty spiffy ones, too!

The examples provide you with a good opportunity to "learn like a hacker"; just copy that beautiful open source code into your favorite editor, save it as example.sc, and compile it with:

swfc example.sc -o example.swf

...then load it into a web page and view it. Then twiddle a few numbers, re-compile, view results, etc. You can get quite far learning a language that way.

For my test, I used an icon from my Slackware distro, found in /usr/share/pixmaps, answering to "Football.xpm". I used Gimp to turn it into a .png, then loaded it into this script:

.flash filename="test.swf" version=5 fps=50
    .gradient rainbow:
        0% blue
        25% green
        50% yellow
        75% orange
        100% red
    .end
    .box background fill=rainbow width=75 height=75
    .put background
    .png ball "../icon_image/Football.png"
    .put ball x=25 y=25 scalex=24 scaley=24
    .frame 50
    .change ball x=50 y=50 scalex=24 scaley=24
    .frame 100
    .change ball x=25 y=25 scalex=24 scaley=24
    .frame 150
    .change ball x=0 y=0 scalex=24 scaley=24
    .frame 200
    .change ball x=25 y=25 scalex=24 scaley=24
.end

Then said a penguin-prayer and compiled it. Results of this experiment here.

Holy moley, Lawks-a-Mercy, I'se be a Flasher!

There's much more that this tool set can do. As far as I can ascertain, it appears that you have all you need to build professional-quality Flash animations and applications.

I'll be poring over this new toy and posting whatever dumb hacks I come up with...