Monday 27 July 2009

Controling Flash Navigation through the URL

Just came across this site http://www.fuelfugitives.co.uk/ which uses the URL in a really interesting way to allow you to access different parts of a Flash Movie depending on the URL. Even though it is the same Flash Movie, not different pages.

This is useful because it means you can bookmark or "add to favourites" a specific part of the Flash Movie. It also means you can use your browser back button to return to a previous part of the same movie (normally with Flash this would result in you leaving the page containing the embedded movie).

So how did they do it?

I'm still looking into that, but a quick view of the source code indicates that some cool javascript is the answer. Will investigate more later... meanwhile - gardening.

Having cleared nigh on 168 square feet of garden (and finding bricks, carpet, bags of clothes and all manner of rubbish buried there by previous owners) with the help of a brother, I have come back to find the answer, and after a bit of searching found if not the solution, a solution...

And the answer is...

http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/

To quote the website:

SWFAddress is a small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for
Flash and Ajax. It's a developer tool, allowing creation of unique virtual URLs
that can point to a website section or an application state. SWFAddress enables
a number of important capabilities which are missing in today's rich web
technologies including:

  • Bookmarking in a browser or social website
  • Sending links via email or instant messenger
  • Finding specific content with the major search engines
  • Utilizing browser history and reload buttons

There are some cool little demos too so you can see it in action, and sure enough, seems to be pretty much what I saw on http://www.fuelfugitives.co.uk/, the site that started me looking in the first place.

So that seems to be it. One more thing to add to my todo list, but I fully intend to put this to good use this holiday. I hope you find it useful as well.

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