Only scroll if you have to!… and screw IE6
23 Oct 2008
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Recently I cam across, “swffit a smart script that resizes your flash movie automatically if your browser window size is smaller or greater than your flash minimum desired size keeping it accessible independent of screen resolution.”
This did exactly what I wanted to do for this blog. It enables me to resize the container div for my swf, while maintaining full browser flash. The page is now resizing every time you change posts or open up the comments below making sure you don’t miss any content that would normally hide off screen.
When I first implemented this I came across a weird IE6 bug… as usual. I used it for work (JianChi US & JianChi Italy) to make sure none of those low res screen users would miss out and strangely I was getting double scroll bars on the right side! However with a bit of messing around I found that removing the position in my div’s CSS fixed things up.
IE6 threw me another broken bolt when I refreshed my page. I am using SWFAddress with it so I would be brought back to the same page within the content. Unfortunately, after refreshing, my alignment of certain things went wonky. It was to do with IE6 caching my stage properties… To fix things up I had to add an ADDED_TO_STAGE event to my main swf that was being preloaded in. As soon as it was added it would reposition things and make JianChi land a happier place.
Another interesting flash bug I came across in this project was in Firefox 3! Imagine that! (It worked on one computer with FF3 and not on another… weird) Anyway my cursor wasn’t showing the little hand on MOUSE_OVER and with a bit of trickery I removed the wmode:”transparent” from my params of the swfObject embed code and Wah! Lah!
Sometimes flash plays tricks on you but often it can be in the very browser you are viewing it with. If you ever find flash content behaving differently in different browsers be sure to double check all your html.
Hope this sorcery helps some of you flash monkeys out a bit. Please feel free to comment if you want to more detail about anything.
Knocking out SWFAddress
11 Oct 2008
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After some serious frustration and a client at work who needs to have deep linking on their site I managed to KO SWFAddress and uncover some not very well documented bugs I was having.
For once they are not flash related bugs. To help out anyone else who scratches their head for a couple hours and gives up and tries again and again here is what I discovered.
You must have a “Flash content id in the swfObject. The content ID is what the javascript uses to refer back to the Flash object.” thanks to this blog post I found. So for example when you embed your swf file with swfObject be sure to include something like this in your attributes
var attributes = { id: “website”};
Another yet very frustrating thing I found out from my friend Google was that the order you embed your javascript for swfObject and SWFAddress on the page matters. You must first embed swfObject and then following it with SWFAddress.
These bothered me for hours so please spread the word for any other frustrated buggers out there. However, now, I am very happy with these amazing open-source tools and my blog now has deep-linking/perma-linking for everyone to use. I would highly recommend SWFAddress for everyone to use with their flash sites. SWFAdsress also easily integrates with Google Analytics these days so no excuses.
I had a request for my old blog and it’s posts. Check out all my old posts here. This is interesting as it shows a lot of the bugs I am exposed to with with this flash blog.
Bloggy = fun times
29 Sep 2008
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So after messing a around a lot.I have found out that:
- Uploading and deleting WordPress takes forever.
- If you accidentdly delete a post… it’s gone baby.
- SWFAdress is pretty cool but I’m gonna have to mess around a bit.
- There are loads of features I want to implement eg. Images and visuals, page resizing with JavaScript, perma-linking (which works by the way just add ?p=26 to the url) but you can’t bookmark it yet without knowing the post ID and much more.
For those of you that missed the deleted post, I hope you like my new blog. In the near future I intend on showing you how magic has been made and add more functionality.
Comments & feedback are welcome…
