Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

[CelticDragon]

Hi guys, haven't been around in a while, been tipping away trying to get far too much done, and I have come up against a proverbial brick wall!

I have been able to add a text file with personal details and various parts of the CD call specific lines for name and address stuff and place them in the appropriate pages and so forth. I am trying to do the same with an image, be it someone's mugshot or company logo. I have tried (I thought sucessfully) to insert it into a MediaPlayer object, but it depends of the version.... My next thought is that flash objects can import html style stuff, and I was wondering if I could include a flash window (taking up about 1/4 - 1/3 of the screen and have it call the image from the distribution folder. Basically what I want to do is build a fully working promotional CD and not have to change the image all the time and rebuild the program. I want to have the basic finished product and burn the application and folders and be able to just add a text file and image to change what I need.....

Any suggestions? Any flash afficionados out there can shed some light on my predicament?

Thanking you in advance....

Stephen

PS: Go on, admit it, you missed my constant questions!

[Corey]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

Hi. Great to see you back, OK:

1. Flash MX cannot import HTML stuff. (MX 2004 can to a degree but is too new to publish, i.e. vers. 7 won't be "out there" for a few months so publishing as vers. 6 is the best for now.)

2. Flash MX can import .jpg dynamically. So you could have a folder full of .jpgs in your Distribution folder and a single .swf which serves them all in context.

But that being said it would be a much more sensible choice for you, if you aren't into flash, to use the web object for this application.

So let's say I have a folder full of product images, let's say 200 X 200 .gif and .jpgs. Using a 200 X 200 web object it is sooper simple to serve these images as need be... You can also hide/show the web object as need be, etc. Let me know what you think...



Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[TJ_Tigger]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

The web object works great to show images (*.jpg). If the images are not of a standard name you may want to include that as part of your text configuration file.

my .02

[CelticDragon]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

Hey guys...

The only thing about the web object is that I don't want to have the shadow scroll bars, I want it to look as if I have placed the image on the program personally.

I know that media player 9 supports images and if it's not the exact size it puts a black border around what's left, which isn't perfect either, but it means that the program sets the limit of the width, height etc.

I'm only going to be displaying one image associated with the customisation. I have some slideshows on the CD done with Swish which rocks, but I was hoping to have to have the program call the image each time...

Don't know if I'm making any sense? No?

[rhosk]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

The only thing about the web object is that I don't want to have the shadow scroll bars, I want it to look as if I have placed the image on the program personally.

Just put scroll=no in your html body tag

[Corey]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

Yeah scroll="no" is better syntax actually...

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[rhosk]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

Define "better". They both work.

[Corey]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

Properly quoting all tags is standard "best practice" for HTML.

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[Lorne]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

The quotes are needed for it to be valid XML, and it is considered deprecated in HTML for that reason (although both were acceptable in older versions of the standard).

[rhosk]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

THAT'S my problem - - I'm "old"

[TJ_Tigger]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

. . . and I shall call it a "laser"

[Lorne]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

"one million dollars!"

[rhosk]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

"Read my lips"

[CelticDragon]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

I didn't know that would work, I think I had tried something along the lines of no vertical or horizontal scroll bar before, but didn't work, probably did it wrong!

How would I go about writing the code for the html to take in the image if it's there and resizing it?

Actually I think I know how to resize it, or rather how to have it display to a specific width or height, but how to I get the image name into the html? Is it a write line in a text file?

Other question, I have another html file in a different part which I don't necessarily want people to be able to easily go in a steal and was thinking about renaming it index.abc and then having the program rename it to index.html but how do I go about getting it to rename it to the temp folder? It keeps renaming it to the src dir folder and then can't from CD and gives up....

[Corey]

Re: Flash Question (Personalising CD) - Bet you all missed my questions!

Sure you can use a TEXT FILE > WRITE action to create HTML files on the fly, that's easy... You can also set image sizes to percentages not just pixels...

As for the other, it shouldn't matter. If you create an HTML page and name it myPage.xyz it'll still appear fine when shown in a browser. If you want security store your HTML in a variable and only write the HTML files during runtime, and destroy them onClose... That's about as good as you can do.

Oh yeah you can also obfuscate the HTML, there's tons of free obfuscators out there which will make a jumbled mess out of your HTML yet it will still be displayed properly when run in a browser... For example here's one but there's tons on Google http://www.rlrouse.com/html-encryptor.html

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software