The best introduction to icon-based authoring is the Macromedia Authorware tutorial. If you've skipped it, the information in the first few pages of this chapter will get you started on your own. Be sure to see Authoring--step-by-step procedures for the topics in Authorware 7 Help that explain how to use icons.
In Authorware, you construct, or author, a multimedia piece by assembling icons on a flowline. The flowline organizes the icons and determines the sequence in which Authorware runs them.
Icons contain the contents of a piece. Different types of icons contain different types of objects, such as graphics, text, sound, digital movies, or a set of instructions. The arrangement of icons forms the logic of a piece--its structure or architecture. The logic of a piece gives the piece shape and makes it work a certain way.
In Authorware, you drag icons from the Icon palette. The Icon palette is like a bottomless well. You can drag up to 32,761 icons from the Icon palette into a single file, but it is best to create smaller modular pieces, which are much easier to work with.
The flowline appears in the Design window. That's where you arrange the icons and construct the logic of the piece. The icons' order on the flowline determines the order in which events take place when the piece runs.
When you run a piece, it appears in the Presentation window. As you build a piece, you use the Presentation window to lay out text, graphics, buttons, and all the other visual elements that make up the piece.
As the author, you can run the piece to see how images appear and whether interactivity works the way you want. Use the Control menu and the Authorware Control Panel to run or step through your piece. Use the start and stop flags to test a specific segment of the piece.
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