Rob Larsen

Belt and Suspenders- Flash Embed With SWFObject and Conditional Comments

If you're using Flash and you want the best possible coverage (meaning it works with users who don't have JS turned on) while still using something like SWFObject where possible to get around the "click here to activate and use this control" ActiveX message in Internet Explorer, then take a look at the ridiculous pattern below.

Warning- not for the squeamish…
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How Did I Miss This? IE Automatic Component Activation Will Revert to Old Behavior

Hallelujah. Bravo Microsoft! I really don't like using JS to embed Flash into a page, so this is good news for me. No more SWFObject for me :)

Don't get me wrong, SWFObject is a great piece of code. I just hate having to think about Flash at all. Unless there's actual communication between the SWF and the page, I just want to dump it into the doc like any other element and be done with it. I can't tell you how many problems I've had over the past year with Flash and JS embed techniques and bizarre bugs… Pain. Great pain.

IE Automatic Component Activation (Changes to IE ActiveX Update)

Back in April 2006, we made a change to how Internet Explorer handled embedded controls used on some webpages. Some sites required users to “click to activate” before they could interact with the control. Microsoft has now licensed the technologies from Eolas, removing the “click to activate” requirement in Internet Explorer. Because of this, we're removing the “click to activate” behavior from Internet Explorer!

It’s important (and cool) to note that this change will require no modifications to existing webpages, and no new actions for developers creating new pages. We are simply reverting to the old behavior. Once Internet Explorer is updated, all pages that currently require “click to activate” will no longer require the control to be activated. They’ll just work.

IEBlog : IE Automatic Component Activation (Changes to IE ActiveX Update)

I like this Flash embed technique.

Assuming I don't want to do any player detection*, don't care about using the embed** tag, and just want to get the swf into the doc without IE hiccuping on it because of the Eolas patent dispute, I'm thinking this is my default Flash embed technique going forward.
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"I hack, baby" or How I Made the SpingWidgets RSS Feed Work on Myspace

"I hack, baby", sung to the tune of "I Get the Job Done," by Big Daddy Kane.

I'm a Feedburner user. One of the tabs in their "publicize" section is a link to a Sping Widgets feed widget that you can use to put your feed on places like Myspace. I thought that seemed like a no brainer, so I did it up real quick and inserted it into my interests. It looked fine, I just couldn't click any of the links*. Apparently, Myspace disables links in Flash objects, which kind of kills the point of having my feed posted over there. Not to be discouraged, I gave it a few minutes though and came up with a pretty simple hack to at least fake it enough to make the thing worthwhile.

What did I was wrap the whole thing in a DIV with height and width equal to the widget. Inside of that I added an empty anchor tag pointing back here. I figured If I couldn't link to individual posts I might as well get some links back to the main blog page and people could figure it out for themselves. I styled that anchor thusly:


/*give it its own height and width*/
display:block;
width:230px;
height:280px;
/*set the position to absolute, so we can (a) stack it and (b) out it where it needs to go with pixel precision*/
position:absolute;
left:0px;
top:20px;
z-index:20;
/*give it a background color and then blow away the background color with opacity without this there's no "hook" for clicks. It's just an empty box I probably could have achieved the same effect with a transparent background image but this is bandwidth free.*/
background-color:#333;
opacity:.05;
filter: alpha(opacity=05)

You can see what the anchor looks like, in terms of positioning, with this example:

As you can see I left room for the scrollbar and the menu.

One thing that makes this work right out of the box is the fact that the Spring Widget code already sets wmode to transparent which allows HTML elements to sit on top of a Flash Movie.

Here's some copy and paste code, if you're into that sort of thing:

<div style="width:250px;height:300px;position:relative;"><a href="http://www.yourlink.com/" style="display:block;width:235px;height:285px;position:absolute;left:0px;top:15px;border:1px solid red;z-index:20;background-color:#333;opacity:.05;filter: alpha(opacity=05)"></a><!–YOUR WIDGET CODE GOES HERE!–>
</div>

*This was just copying and pasting the code as pure HTML I'm not sure if using the Spring Widgets "insert into myspace" button works any better as I couldn't get it to actually insert the code into my profile.

Another weekend special.

This is actually from the 7th, but I never published it.

quickie.jpg

I have video of myself drawing this. I've got to get the whole Flash video thing worked out before publishing. Stay tuned.
Here it is. Flash Video is really easy.