First off - SWFObject has been nothing but a savior in my web development endeavors.. so thank you!
I have successfully used the "full screen" SWFObject template to obtain my goal of a "storybook web site". I have searched the Internet for hours upon hours to determine how I can get my large SWF's to cache and begin playing before the actual download is complete. I've done this before using FLV's but the SWF's in question were made by a third-party application (Amara) and thus far I've gotten errors every time I attempt to crreate an FLV.
Can I use SWFObject to cache large SWF's so they begin playing before downloaded? If not how can I add a pre-loader movie that shows download progress to my already existing SWFObject code?
Thanks so much to anyone who can offer me guidance!
Whoops - forgot about the White Screen of Death! This being a quick white flash that appears whenever a link to an SWF is clicked. Absolutely nothing in any of my code is white. I may have read somewhere that this white flash appears becuause there is a time gap between the HTML page loading and the begining of the SWF download. Anyone know about this funky white stuff?
The URL to the site I'm working on is: www.fromoureyestoyours.com
Click the Rwanda Button and select "boy with no name". You'll see the white flash and experience the hesitattion as the SWF loads (links "grandma", "men in pink", and others have evenl longer "load wait" times.
In the case of the background - I have set every HTML parameter known to man to force black backgrounds. The SWF backgrounds are all set to black and are created using Amara Software... unfortunately there is no "pre-loader" functionality with Amara. Because the SWF is made with third-party software I'm unable to add a preloader...
Today I added code to the index.html so that the framset sources are defined as "black". No change with the white flash. I am completely open to suggestions that would include scrapping the use of frames. This should be such a simple site - one page split about 75/25 between a content area and a menu. I have researched the many ways to incorporate this functionality and somehow wandered into "Framesville". I'd like to provide justification but in this case... I ran out of breadcrumbs a long time ago. If it hasn't been coined before then allow me to be the first: Googleitis - the result of attempting to "cram" mass amounts of information from Google over painfully long stretches of time.
BLACKKITE: Thanks for that suggestion. I do have Flash 8 and have just completed Amara's walk-thru on how to add their SWF's to Flash. The result is a "loader.swf" that uses loadMovie Actionscript to launch the main movie - and it works! However this does not solve my SWF loadtime issue. Should I now move or "cut" the script from Frame1 to Frame2 and insert a progess bar into Frame1? Suggestions or links to tutorials for adding progress bars?
Si++: "You just add the "bgcolor" parameter with setParam" My recollection is that when following the instructions for using SWFObject I removed all "setParam" commands. Here is a code example from a HTML page that loads in the MainFrame:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>See What I See</title> <script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script> <style type="text/css">
/* hide from ie on mac \*/ html { height: 100%; overflow: hidden; }
<div id="flashmovie"> <strong>You need to upgrade your Flash Player</strong> This is replaced by the Flash content. Place your alternate content here and users without the Flash plugin or with Javascript turned off will see this. Content here allows you to leave out <code>noscript</code> tags. </div>
<script type="text/javascript"> // <![CDATA[
var so = new SWFObject("swis.swf", "swis", "100%", "100%", "8", "#000000"); so.addVariable("flashVarText", "this is passed in via FlashVars for example only"); so.addParam("scale", "noborder"); so.write("flashmovie");