Animation and Effects with Macromedia Flash MX 1002004 [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Navigating Content

In earlier chapters, you created websites with simple navigation systems that let you move between pages on a site. In Project 8, you create a simple site that had a few buttons to navigate between each page. You used transitions to create interest and fluidity between different areas of the website. Even more important than visual interest is whether or not your website is intuitive. If users cannot find your content, the message or advertisement isn't successful. You must communicate the purpose of your site to the user to create a successful website.

There are several reasons you might choose to use Macromedia Flash for your gallery instead o103. If you want to add multi media elements to your gallery to make it into more of an "experience," Flash makes it easy. For example, you can easily add sound and video to the gallerymore so than wit105. Additionally, you don't need to worry about your users having the correct plug-ins installed to play back these elements (such as requiring QuickTime or Windows Media Player) because most visitors have Flash Player installed. Not requiring the use of several different plug-ins makes the user experience ideal.

Flash also lets you customize the way you handle multimediafrom user control to the media control buttons. If you use Flash, you can completely control the look of your site. You can add special effects (such as fades, transitions, and brightness levels) to the content of your gallery. For example, you wouldn't be able to add a mask, a brightness tween, or a progress bar to your photos in a111 gallery. Therefore, Flash lets you have a greater amount of creative control over the effects, navigation, and look of the gallery. What's even more impressive is how easy it is to create a dynamic gallery that loads each photo in when the user requests it, as opposed to loading the entire page of photos at the same time.

Project 9 and this chapter's project), you create more-involved navigational systems while adding effects and animation to improve usability. In this chapter, you need to organize, control, and navigate content as opposed to menu optionsa series of photosinto a system that users can easily navigate.

Chapter 9).

When you plan a gallery, you should make considerations about how you structure it. You might need to consider how many thumbnails you show on a single page, and how to organize those thumbnails. Will users need to scroll through them, or will you arrange them in a grid format? For example, experienced Flash users might randomly scatter photos over the Stage and let users move them around, or they might create a custom scrollbar on the Stage where users can move the scroll bar horizontally to reveal photos from left to right.

You should plan any complex content systems before you start to develop your gallery, much like the Visio flow chart planning demonstrated in Chapter 9. Refer to that chapter if necessary to read more about planning and flow charts. If you have a complex navigational system, this is particularly important.

Loading and progress bars

In this chapter, you create progress bars for your website. You used progress bars in earlier chapters, but in this chapter you create one that loads the full-sized JPEG image, and then a second progress bar that loads the entire gallery. The progress bars use the MovieClipLoader class to handle loading content into a SWF file. This provides you with better control over the content that you load, and the class helps you display accurate progress of the loading process.

The ProgressBar Component

The ProgressBar component, part of the V2 components that install with Macromedia Flash MX 2004, allows you to display what percentage of the dynamically loaded content has already been loaded into Flash. This lets you show users how far along they are in the loading process and gives them a rough estimate of how long they might need to wait for the content to load. The ProgressBar component consists of two main sections: a bar that grows to display how much of the content has loaded so far and a label that shows the user exactly what percentage of the content has loaded. You can customize each of these sections so they use different colors and bar styles, or display the number of bytes loaded and total bytes of the content being loaded.

To use the ProgressBar component, you can drag it from the Component panel onto the Stage, and set the required parameters using the Property inspector or the Component inspector. For example, drag a copy of the ProgressBar and Loader components onto the Stage. Give the ProgressBar component an instance name of image_pb and the Loader component an instance name of image_ldr. Click the image_ldr instance and use the Property inspector to set the contentPath property to an image either on your local computer or your web server. Select the image_pb instance, and use the Property inspector to set the mode property to polled and the source property to the instance name of your Loader component (image_ldr). Select Control > Test Movie to test the SWF file in the test environment. Your image loads into the Loader component and the ProgressBar component displays the image's loading progress.