iPhone / iPod / iPad Detection

Flash on the iPhone? Unfortunatly not (not yet… I’m an optimist ). But anyway, I believe it’s the wrong way to have the exact same site on a mobile device and in the browser. Not only is the screen smaller and loading takes longer, I personally have other priorities when surfing on a mobile phone. So let’s take this as a challenge and provide different content when someone visits your page on an iPhone. All I did is provide a detection in index.php which redirects users of iPhone & Co. to a special page: iphone.php. In this file the same xml structure is parsed, but this time the navigation is displayed in a flat hierarchy to provide as much room as possible for the content itself. Check it out! I have used some iPhone specific settings so that the zooming is disabled for example:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0;">

You only need to adjust the CSS files to your needs.

Here 2 links with useful and detailed infos:
http://www.engageinteractive.co.uk/blog/2008/06/19/tutorial-building-a-website-for-the-iphone/
http://fuint.com/2010/09/when-developing-websites-you-have-to-...
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Automatic width and height handling with full browser scrolling

I’ve decided to implement this into the Fleb Framework, because I use it in every website to be sure the user can see all content, even if he/she has a small display. I prefer to use the built in UI Scrollbars, because that way I get the most flexibility.
A few times I used other solutions that make use of the native browser scrollbars, but I was not happy with that, because there is no way to scroll just a part of the website: it always scrolls the whole embedded SWF. Check out this deeplink of the Flebsite demo and scroll. Watch the word “BASE” at the upper left corner and also the black gradient at the top. It stays where it is, exactly what is wanted. This would not be possible if the browser scrollbars were used. Or another example to make it more clear: only the content is scrolled, the header and footer don’t move. By the way: of course you can set if and how much the scrolling will ease in and out.

But if you prefer it the other way (SWFFit for example): simply remove a few lines of code to get rid of the SiteScrollbars class and use your preferred solution.
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Font Manager

Another nice thing is now part of the Fleb framework: dynamic font loading. This is a really cool method I’ve found some time ago. Here is a post about it. It’s ridiculously simple: Just create an empty FLA file, add one or more dynamic textfields to the stage and select the fonts, compile, done. All you have to do in Fleb later is telling the framework where the fonts are:

Core.getInstance().init(this, pH, nH, "fonts/fonts.swf", "fonts/style.css");

You can also load the styles at the same time. The font manager will be accessible from anywhere like this:

import net.kaegi.utils.VarCentral;
var varcentral:Object = VarCentral.getInstance().vars;
tf.styleSheet = varcentral.flebFontManager.getStyleSheet();
tf.text = "<span class='font2'>" + txt + "</span>";

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Print Manager: multipage printing out of the box

In the flebsite demo, I have integrated the printing solution to show how you can use it in a Fleb site if needed. It is a very handy method to provide the possibility to print out your website or parts of it. The Print class will adjust the size, accordingly to the choosen paper orientation, to always fit the content to the page (or pages, if multipage printing is desired). This class is simply imported in your Fleb main document class. It’s there for your convenience: if you don’t need it, just remove the import and the printing methods. To get more info about this class visit this post and the documentation.

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And now?

You will find all of this in the demo site. You can download all files and analyze them. To get started and download the framework, please visit the documentation.

Cheers (and merry christmas if this was my last post in this year…)
Christian

I finally have launched a website on which I can show that I actually use all the stuff that I write about in this blog. I have also integrated my upcoming online xml editor, which is almost complete. Well, it actually is, but as usual I have to setup the documentation etc. But you can already have a look and try out the basic functions: www.online-xml-editor.com (User: demo, Pw: demo). For the menubar of the XML editor I used the global navigation. As you can see, it is also very suitable to create application-like menus!

BTW: All content of the turtlebite.com flebsite is managed by the Turtlebite Flash CMS. Have a look at this video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQrFRPzPNCw

Online XML Editor
I will write a special post for the XML editor itself soon!

Cheers,
Christian

This site was built with the Fleb Framework and the client can upload files and edit every line of text. This was especially useful because I’m not really an expert in the russian language…

www.russiabeats.com

Managing table reservation
The Turtlebite Flash CMS Framework is also used to manage the table reservation of the website.
Visit this link to see the front end of it.

I’m constantly improving the Flash CMS. At the moment I’m working on an online XML editor.

Stay tuned!
Christian

But what the heck has “Dinner is served” to do with the Fleb Framework?
When I build a flebsite, I like to think of it as a table ready laid. If I want to have dinner, I will always find 3 things for sure: the table itself, a plate and some food on the plate. (Some of you might argue now that you can also eat on the floor without a plate, holding the food in your hands… Right. And you can also build websites by using SimpleText or Word… ) Okay, back to the point. Oh, I forgot two more things: the tablecloth or placemat and the menu card. But lets start with the table.

The table
Normally, you do not spend a thought about the table itself, but it is really important. If you remove it,  you will end up in a mess. It always has to be there, but once you have placed it somewhere in your house or flat, you probably will spend more time on the things you put on that table than the table itself. So to me as a flash website designer, I like to see the table as the necessary PHP/CSS/HTML/SEO construct I don’t want to care about every time I build a new flebsite.

The tablecloth or placemat
For a decent dinner, before I put a plate on the table, I want to have a tablecloth or at least a placemat. To me, the tablecloth/placemat represents the basic settings of a flebsite: all the things that are most likely not going to change during a session, like the background image or color, a footer, a logo, a sound on/off switch etc. The tablecloth stands for a fullscreen flebsite, whereas the placemat represents a fixed size flebsite. The placemat, for example, may or may not be moved around with the plate, whereas the tablecloth will certainly stay in place when I scale the table (ups, sorry, I mean the browser window…)

The plate and the food on it
The plate is the place where the action is happening: During a dinner, you may have a drink, followed by a salad or soup, then the main dishes and finally a dessert. The plate may or may not change for every course, but the food certainly does. You can share one plate for salad and soup (maybe you are having dinner at home and just don’t have more plates… ), while the main dishes are being served on different plates (even the shape and colors of the plates may change). The dessert will be served on a nice transparent glass plate.
Think of the plate as your content page. The SWF displaying your data. The food is the actual data source. So you can have one plate that holds different food (the dynamically loaded content). If the food (the content) will be completely different (e.g. a change from a contact form to a gallery), than you might want to change the plate as well (the SWF). Than you have the cutlery that may or may not change with the plate: You can use the same fork for the salad and for the main dish. But you surely prefer a smaller spoon for the dessert than for the soup.

Got the point?
While the table will not change at all and the tablecloth and placemat will remain the same during a “dinner session”, the plates, cutlery, glasses etc. will change, being moved around and emptied/filled up a lot.

One more: the menu card
To make this metaphor complete I like to think of the global navigation as the menu card. When you hold it in your hands, it is floating above the table. In your mind you “navigate” through the dinner by selecting your food just like clicking on the buttons of a website.

…and the last one: the waiter or “the brain”
Because I later refer to “the brain” when talking about “main.swf”, think of it as the person who knows everything about your dinner: the waiter. While your guests are the visitors of your flebsite, the waiter knows what to put on which plate, where to place it on the table, in which order the dishes have to be served, who has salad and who has the soup, who is vegetarian and has the risotto, when it is time to light the candles, clean up breadcrumbs, dim the lights, pump up the volume of the background music, help you with the chair if you need to go to the ladies’/men’s room, inform you about an incoming telephone call, when to ask you if the coffee may be served and so on….

Fleb Framework 1.2

What’s new?
As written in the introduction, the whole framework has been cleaned up and restructured. Now there is much less code in main.as and you can concentrate on the design etc… As the Fleb Framework is based on the Global Navigation, I have moved the navigation settings into structure.xml. So now the whole website structure is defined in a central place.

Flow
When base.swf (the “tablecloth/placemat”) is loaded, it starts loading main.swf (the “waiter” or “brain”). A preloader in base.swf shows the loading progress, main.swf will use 50% of the preloader bar. When main.swf is loaded, the navigation is initialised, which will use the other 50% of the preloader bar so it will reach 100% when main.swf and the navigation are completely initialised. Main.as will also create the pageHolder movieclip (the “plate”) and the navigationHolder movieclip (the “menu card”)

Examine the demosite

Example 1: Landing on the homepage of the site
Launch the demosite: http://www.turtlebite.com/flebsite_demo_v2
As you can see, there is kind of an intro before the navigation is animated into place. Of course it is up to you to have an intro. This is just an example.

Example 2: Deeplinking
An intro is nice if the user enters the site via the homepage. But what about a deeplink?
Try this:  http://www.turtlebite.com/flebsite_demo_v2/en/products/turbo-series
Now the user wants to get quickly to the content, so the intro is skipped.

Example 3: Deeplinking with parameters
Maybe you have an image gallery on your site. You want to be able to deeplink to a specific image, but, because the gallery gets updated often, you cannot define all links in structure.xml. They need to be dynamic.
Check this: http://www.turtlebite.com/flebsite_demo_v2/en/service/some/more/info
The address defined in structure.xml is “/en/service/”. Everything which is beyond this scope will be stored in an array called deeplink. That way you can set up an event listener in your SWF and do whatever is needed, for example loading a certain image. This even works without flash, so you can catch the deeplink in your PHP file to feed the search engines:
http://www.turtlebite.com/flebsite_demo_v2/noflash.php?swfaddress=/en/service/some/more/info

Show your clients the “no flash” version
Maybe you’ve noticed the noflash.php part in the previous sample link above.
Try this: http://www.turtlebite.com/flebsite_demo_v2/noflash.php
This is the site the user will see if he cancels the express install procedure. But at the same time it is really useful to easily show your clients the work “under the hood” without having them deactivate javascript.

Transitioning pages
Launch the demosite: http://www.turtlebite.com/flebsite_demo_v2. If you navigate to “About us”, then “Service”, you see that the pages are just fading in and out. Now click on “Static content”. Here the previous page will not only fade out, but also move to the right, then there is a pause, just before the “static content” page slides in from the left.In fact it is very easy to set up different transitioning modes.

SWFObject 2.2 / 2.1
While using the new SWFAddress version 2.4, there are problems with SWFObject 2.2 when you cancel ExpressInstall in Firefox on PC: you will end up with a blank screen. This issue is not occuring with SWFObject 2.1, so I will continue using this version for the time being.

How to start?
Download the Fleb Framework from the download section. It also contains the complete source of the demosite. Dive into the files and visit the documentation, I have spent some time updating it.

Update 9 december 2010: Be sure to visit this post about version 2!

Happy coding!
Christian (the flebber….;-))

Test it here (select example Nr. 16)

Visit the download section and the changelog for more details.

Cheers,
Christian

What is the Fleb Framework and who needs it?
It’s an open source front-end framework for AS3 to help you build pure flash websites with full SEO support. It is based on the Global Navigation for Flash and the SWFAddress SEO Solution. You define the whole structure of the website (navigation, title, description, keywords, assets etc.) in an XML file which is parsed by your SWF files for your flash site and PHP files for the no-javascript SEO version of your site.

What does “Fleb” stand for?
Very simple: It is just a short form of “flash web” -> “fleb”. I prefer to build flebsites now…

Concentrate on Flash
All is done automatically: You don’t have to think about the layout of the no-javascript website any longer, just concentrate on the content, keywords and description in your structure.xml file. By using the global navigation you can create almost any navigation setup you can think of. Check it out.

Test it!
Let me demonstrate it. Start the Fleb Demosite. Navigate through the site and observe the address bar. Also use the browser back/forward buttons. At any point, reload the site to see how deeplinking is working. Speaking of deeplinking, try this: Add some additional parameters to the url, for example like so:

http://www.flashcmsframework.com/flebsitedemo/#/en/products/ultra-power/1/2/3/

As you can see the parameters are split into an array. Whenever there are parameters in the URL an event is dispatch which you can listen to from anywhere and react accordingly.

SEO, please!
Now comes the interesting part: Turn off JavaScript to see what the search engines get.

The navigation is created automatically by parsing the same XML file that is used for your flebsite (structure.xml). You can easily adjust the colors of the sidebar, header, content background etc. in a separate css file, if needed. But remember, this no javascript version will almost no one ever see! . Please navigate around and watch the address bar. As you can see, the “#” has gone, you have clean URLs for the search engines. Also look at the source text of the website to see the content of the metatags “keywords” and “description”. Now turn javascript back on and reload. SWFAddress will automatically insert a “#” and you will be taken to the right location inside your flash website.

Since my last post about the fleb framework I have merged the 2 PHP files “seonavig.php” and “datasource.php” into one file, “structure.php” to make it easier. Please visit the docs for an in-depth explanation of each file.

Open and very flexible
Besides the use of the Global Navigation you are completely free how you create/code your site. The Fleb Demosite (included in the download) is just a suggestion and shows the way I use to create websites. The main part of your code will be in main.swf. This is the place where the navigation and SWFAddress are initialized and where the loading/unloading of content is organized. Anyway, there are some techniques and classes involved I like to explain. Remember, it’s up to you if you use these or any other solutions.

Debugging
I use one of these 3 debugger solutions. Each one has its advantages.
Alcon
Arthropod
DeMonster

Global event handling & global variables
Some time ago I discovered this post by Reyco1 about a centralized event system. This is very useful for events that need to be used all over your project. For example, in Fleb there are 3 of those “global” events: onDeeplink, onLanguageChange, onStageResize. These event classes are included in Fleb. Based on this concept I have created a very simple class called VarCentral, which is a singleton that stores any variable you can globally access from anywhere in your project (an object, for example):

 VarCentral.getInstance().vars.hello = {a:1, b:2}

Loading assets
For simple cases, I use a slightly enhanced class  found in Colin Moock’s Book “Essential Actionscript 3″, LoadChildAsset. That is okay for most of my needs. If you need a more sophisticated class, you have to check out the BulkLoader from Arthur Debert. It’s awesome!
And this also looks very promising (though I have not used it yet): Queueloader by Donovan Adams.

Browser window resizing
If I need a script that resizes my flash movie automatically if the browser window size changes, i use swffit.

Tweening
TweenLite/Tweenmax
GO
Desuade Motion Package (not really tested yet, it’s quite new but looks very promising)

Cheers!
Christian

Check out the following 3 screenshots.:

Global Navigation XML + Gaia site XML together in one file

As you can see, this is how it used to be up to now (Global Navigation version 1.57a). The attributes of both Gaia and Global Navigation together in one file.

Gaia site.xml without Global Navigation

This is the normal Gaia site.xml without the Global Navigation.

The new Global Navigation XML source file

This is the new Global Navigation navig.xml file. Yellow marked you can see that the new attribute “id” is the same as the page IDs of the Gaia site.xml above. The root node can be of any name, but the “navigation” and “button” nodes have to be named like that.

Ok, but what is so exciting about this?

The fact that you don’t have to handle the button IDs by yourself is one thing, the other is that this is one of the last pieces of my own Flash Website Framework called “FLEB” which is based on the Global Navigation. One of the key features of this framework is SEO. Stay tuned!

Visit the docs to download the source files and classes.

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Here is the difference.

Old version:

// Imports
import net.kaegi.navigation.NavigationManager;
import net.kaegi.navigation.NavigationButton;
import net.kaegi.events.NavigationEvent;
import net.kaegi.events.EventCentral;

// create NavigationnavigationManager = new NavigationManager(this, "xml/site.xml");
navigationManager.setFadeInOnMouseOver(false);
navigationManager.setFade(true);
navigationManager.setFadeInChainDelay(0.3);

// Event Listeners
EventCentral.getInstance().addEventListener(NavigationEvent.MC_ACTIVATED, btnActivateHandler,false,0,true);
EventCentral.getInstance().addEventListener(NavigationEvent.MC_FADE_IN, btnsFadeIn,false,0,true);
EventCentral.getInstance().addEventListener(NavigationEvent.MC_FADE_OUT, btnsFadeOut, false, 0, true);
EventCentral.getInstance().addEventListener(NavigationEvent.LOADING_COMPLETE, loadingCompleteHandler, false, 0, true);

//.......

Version 1.56:

// Imports
import net.kaegi.navigation.NavigationManager;
import net.kaegi.navigation.NavigationButton;
import net.kaegi.events.NavigationEvent;

// create NavigationnavigationManager = new NavigationManager(this, "xml/site.xml");
navigationManager.setFadeInOnMouseOver(false);
navigationManager.setFade(true);
navigationManager.setFadeInChainDelay(0.3);

// Event Listeners
navigationManager.addEventListener(NavigationEvent.MC_ACTIVATED, btnActivateHandler,false,0,true);
navigationManager.addEventListener(NavigationEvent.MC_FADE_IN, btnsFadeIn,false,0,true);
navigationManager.addEventListener(NavigationEvent.MC_FADE_OUT, btnsFadeOut, false, 0, true);
navigationManager.addEventListener(NavigationEvent.LOADING_COMPLETE, loadingCompleteHandler, false, 0, true);

//.......

Download + Documentation

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I’ve included the TweenLite/TweenMax classes as well, but again, be sure to get the latest version of the Tweening classes.

———————————————————————————————————–
Download global navigation (includes Gaia v3.0.4 and all sample files)
Download global navigation classes only
I removed the downloads here, because I have set up an online documentation with all the downloads:

Global Navigation Downloads + Documentation

Introduction to global navigation
How to, Showcase, Infos, Samples
———————————————————————————————————–

Real examples: websites using the global navigation

WITKA
Data Logistix AG
Impact Unlimited
Hunziker Betatech AG
eXtenso IT Services

Version history

(Please visit the documentation for the latest info)

1.51

• Small adjustement in LoadChildAsset class. remove Listener when loading is cancelled. LoadChildAsset.as is used to load the button swfs. This fix was in fact not really necessary, because the loading of the buttons is not cancelled. But nevertheless, if you want to use LoadChildAsset.as by itself, this fix was important.
  

1.50

• It is now possible to include a path to your btn swfs –> new NavigationManager(ref:MovieClip, xmlFile:String, btnPath:String = “”). This can be helpfull if your btn swfs are in a different location and you want to keep the xml file clean (btnSWF=”mainBtn.swf” looks better than btnSWF=”http://www.yourdomain.com/folder/anotherfolder/buttonfolder/mainBtn.swf”)

1.49

• “btnHide” attribute added. This is used when the button itself should not be visible, but it needs to be loaded for proper alignment etc. This is often the case with the “home” button: The functionality should be in the navigation but it is triggered by a click on the logo and not specific “home”-button.

1.48

• Bugfix when the last btn had sub-buttons (Type Error #1010 with btns[nextSiblings[0]].makeRoomAddSpace)

1.47

• I took almost all code that was in the btn swf and encapsulated it in the NavigationButton class, so now it is much easier (especially for the designer) to layout and arrange the graphics and button labels in the fla.
• Bugs fixed concerning loading issues
• There is a new NavigationEvent LOADING_COMPLETE. When the NavPage loads, the afterTransitionIn Event is hijacked. After the global navigation is completely loaded, Gaia is released.
• The examples uses the newest Gaia Version 3.0.2.
• …and many small improvements.

1.46

• Initial release

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See life demo

How does it work?
The global navigation consists of 3 parts: a SWF of a single button with rollover, rollout, press etc. states and a text label, an XML file containing the structure and a class (in fact there are 3 main classes, but you don’t need to worry about them), which mixes everything together and spits out a neat navigation.

See samples and download source code here.

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