Bio-Bak: Flash Mentalist Alert!

LOL. What can I say, I have just found probably the maddest web site I have ever seen. I'm not even sure where to start when i comes to describing this site to be honest. Big bright bold colors, crazy characters and sound effects, immersive/infuriating navigation, and some bonkers sound effects(if you think you can hear your hard drive making wierd noises, don't worry, its this site - it took me a while to realise!) .

I love this one so much I'm blogging about it, as well as featuring it on the UKDD showcase.

A definate Site of the Moment! Check it out!

Interesting little AS2/flash bug

Hmm, this post is more of a quick "note to self", after making a dumb mistake on a relatively simple Flash project. The issue appears to be that there is a discrepancy between the way the Flash IE Active X control and the Firefox Flash plugin handles loading XML.

As far as I can tell in the following piece of code, we should only see the trace 'we are ready to go' if the data is loaded and ready to be used.

var my_xml:XML = new XML();
my_xml.ignoreWhite = true;
my_xml.onLoad = function(success:Boolean) {
if (success) {
var intItems:String
intItems = my_xml.childNodes[0].length;
trace('we are ready to go')
}else{
trace('oops there seems to be a problem')
}
my_xml.load('myxmldocument.xml')

That does'nt seem to be the case in the IE active x control however. My project still progressed to it's main actions (on subsequent frames on the main timeline) on the success call, but without having all the XML ready to go. Firefox worked fine, but IE kept telling me that my content was undefined.

The only way round this way to check the .loaded property before progressing. This ONLY fires when everything is ready to go. Eg:

if(my_xml.loaded){
trace('Right, now we are REALLY ready to go')
}

Hope it helps...

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AJAX v Flash Face-off!

During my time as a freelancer, I was involved in quite a few "rich internet applications". I have always been prepared to recommend Flash, if and when it was a suitable solution. Today however, I seem to be recommending Flash based solutions less and less, instead, I lean more and more on the magic of the jQuery library.

While Flash undoubtedly has the upper hand when it comes to handling video, and audio, and "all singing, all dancing" multimedia sites, the recent maturing of JavaScript, and CSS has made me re-examine my toolset.

One of the most obvious reasons for my move to jQuery as my "weapon of choice", is that it is, in some ways, similar to ActionScript 2 coding, and, as a result, I can crack on without having to completely get my head around a new language.

I've never really been a bona-fide programmer, and my background is very much that of the self taught web designer, who learnt on the job, (including spending 2-3 yrs working exclusively with Flash) .

12 years on, I now work for one of the UK's biggest sites, as a "web designer" (You have no idea how much I hate that label) - although, my role seems to primarily be focussed on client-side "user experience" stuff, working with Flash for web based video delivery, and XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery etc, rather than true design work.

As a result, AJAX and jQuery in particular has made a huge difference to my work, in terms of speed of development and the ability to easily as rich interactivity via progressive enhancement.

If you've ever considered the similarities and differences between the two technologies, including how they stack up in terms of compatibility, SEO, mobile support, development tools and more, then you could do worse than check out this article on the Webdesigner magazine site.

Once you've read the article, have a look at the source code of the Webdesigner site. Surely a magazine that professes the be "The Ultimate Design Mag for the Web Professional" should have moved away from a site built with Dreamweaver, using the classic "MM_" JavaScript behaviours and tables based layout?