How we do it and why

For a long time now, my sites have been catching people’s eye. The most common feedback I get about them is that they are visually appealing. This is a very strong point in my view. A picture says a thousand words and people are happy to look at it, while they are not willing to read a thousand words. Going by that theory, some of my sites are presenting more than 300,000 words about their product and they are being read every day. People love my flash sites and they climb steadily in the search ranks for that precise reason.

Because of the growing pressure from the ipad market, I have been doing some reserach and devolpment about how we can best present our sites without Flash. We don’t want to forfeit the visual impact and emotional motivation that a well presented site holds. Some sites designed for mobile devices, actually just present a text-only version of their content. I think this is very poor marketting. People don’t make consumer choices based on information. They make those choices based on emotion.

I have developed a non-flash engine (still refining it) that uses javascript and jquery to present a non-scalable version of my sites. It replicates the flash version in many ways and yet still has a few restrictions. I would like to outline the features of this method here.

On the positive side:

• The site is the same content. All of the content shown on your non-flash version is drawn frome the same sources. This is very important. When you update your information in one place, via the regular text editor I provide, it is updated accross devices. The same text and images (and menu for those using the new databse driven menu config) appear on both. So there is no new content just a different program presenting the same content. Great!
• The site knows what device is viewing it. The first thing determined is whether the device has flash installed. Next the agent code is extracted from the browser of the device so we know whether it is an iphone, a pc, an android phone, an ipad, whatever. Then a respective “style-sheet” is loaded to help that device know just how we want the site layed out. So far this is tested on ios devices (iphone, ipad), pc and android devices.
• Smooth photo slideshow. Whether you know it or not, those large images that dominate your site are selling for you – guaranteed. I have utilised a javascript application to achieve almost the same result on non-flash devices. You can see it in the example.
• All on one page. We still have no need to scroll down. This is not a long columnar blog-style site where scrolling down removes you from the land of colour and emotion and leaves you in the wasteland of dry blank ink on white screen. The site is all contained within the one “frame” just like the flash version.
• Touch friendly. The site can be zoomed in and panned around using your finger on touch devices. In addition, the scrolling of text within a text box is by the same method, just drag it up or down with your finger. No need to tap tap tap on the down arrow.
• No change for search engine friendliness. All text is loaded at the start, but hidden from the viewer until requested. Research has shown that Google doesn’t mind this at all as long as the info can be found by the viewer by one method or another – so the result is complete text indexing. great again!
• For those of you who have back end photo organisers, text editors, comment editors and so on, there is no change required either to these engines or to your data. It all stays the same. the same content, the same database, the same folders of images, video and etc.

On the negative side:

• No resize. The site will fit inside a large screen with blank borders around it, or alternatively, a full-size background image that scales, while the other elements of the site do not (at this stage)
• Slower performance of animation and blending. Flash is still the best at what it does. You must remember that. It does many things for which there is simply no replacement. We are not moving away from it because it is poor, simply because the current mobile device monopoly owner refuses to allow us to use it on their devices. I still feel ticked off by this as you may well do also. The end result of Apple’s big greedy boycott policy is a squashing of internet creativity in order to protect their own profit margins. The internet was never meant to be this way. If you want to know why I think Apple have done this read here:
• Javascript too can be disabled. Without javascript, this new version won’t look right either but then again, almost nothing does. The good news is that all devices across all platforms have javascript enabled by default so you have to intentionally turn it off for the new site to fail its presentation.
• The software can be stolen. This may not concern you too much, but I’ll tell you anyway. Once your flash site is created, it is packaged up into a single file that is very hard to open and inspect to see how the internal workings are created. This is precisely why Apple don’t allow it. With Javascript, every character written in code can be read by anyone. It’s call “view source”. It simply means “show me how they are doing this”. In the long run, it means that your competition can simply copy your site, change the logo, the images and some text and have a site that looks and works exactly the same. that could be bad.

Within these restrictions, there is not a lot that we can’t do in javascript that we did in Flash, albeit a little slower. So don’t be too concerned. The world is constantly changing and we must change with it. I do hope that web development will one day be free again from companies who refuse ‘this’ technology or ‘that’ instead of simply allowing everything on their hardware. Until then, we are under Apple’s control and there’s no use protesting – let’s take advantage of every change.

So check out the example – this is not a live site just yet (2/2/2012) so it’s still in progress. For those of you who get on board with this change in the next three months, you will get free upgrades as we refine the delivery method to get the best results, so don’t be shy to jump in first. You can expect that the upgrade will cost between $800 and $1800 depending on how old your site is and how complex. But if you’re like a client I sat with yesterday seeing that 750 people had visited his site on ipads and iphones over the last 3 months, you will know that you simply must show them something better than a text-only site. It will pay a good return on this small investment.

Call me for more info. Ph 0408 826 455

Brent.

Many people want to know how their site will be viewed on an iPad. Usually the question refers to flash content.

It is true that iPads do not display any flash content at all. They can be modified to force an install of the plugin, but I believe such modifications to their software voids the hardware warranty. That right there should tell you a bit. Apple is the only company I know of that will void a warranty of hardware, based on the software the user chooses to run.

There is much debate over why they have taken this stand against third party applications, and it is worth noting that Apple refuse other technologies too. It is my belief that Apple do this to control the transaction of money on their devices. Their policy is that they require 30% of the gross of all digital products sold on their devices. Applications such as flash actionscript can move data around without anyone else seeing what’s going on.

Apple has been in dispute with Sony Music because Sony’s iphone application sent people out to their website to finish purchases, thereby cutting Apple out of the gravy train. Similar disputes have happened with Amazon and Apple and probably many others. These companies are being forced to fork out 30% of their gross to the manufacturers of the devices that present their catalog.

It is also worth noting at this point in portable Internet history, that Google’s android and the devices that use it have no such claim. These manufacturers sell hardware products and allow their customers to use whatever software they choose on those devices. Imagine that! Tablet manufacturers like Asus, Samsung, Motorola and Toshiba are making brilliant devices and your flash content shows perfectly on them. Android phones also show your flash site as it was designed.

To give some idea of how handicapped iPad users are by this boycott of these technologies by Apple, just think that 80% of all video on the Internet is delivered with flash plugins. Think about the massive companies that have their primary sites built in Flash. If you’d like to start browsing them, just check out the premier award site FWA where almost every site is built in flash. These companies have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Flash technology and are still doing so. Unfortunately, many of them are building additional faces to their beautiful sites. These are a dumbed-down version of their site that can be seen on iPads and iPhones. I say “dumbed-down” because the reality is that nothing exists to replace the capabilities of Flash.

HMTL 5

If you say this to the rep at the Apple store, he or she will promptly tell you that html 5 has replaced flash. That’s a nice sentiment that may be true in 10 years, but it isn’t event close to true yet. Internet Explorer doesn’t support html5 at all yet and it is the most widely used browser. So if you build your website in it, you will lose more than half the market! There are other problems with html5 at this stage too. It is still in development and so sites that use it will require constant updating just to work properly, especially over the interim. Flash is the only way to do a great many things. That’s why so many educational programs like mathletics, and spellodrome use it exclusively. Gee, I hope your child didn’t want to get educated on your iPad.

What to do?

So that’s the low down on how things stand at present. I think that Apple’s bullying and control campaign will one day be over, but it will require that the common folk stop lining their pockets and funding their marketing. Apple is so keen on the billions it makes through selling other people’s products on their devices, that they are willing to sell their devices at cost or lower, just to get you into the trap.

Meanwhile, the progress of Internet delivery and development is being greatly slowed by this stale-mate. Internet sites are getting more ordinary, less flowing, less smooth and untuitive and interactive simply because they have to work on an iPad.

For my clients, your site will show on an iPad but not as it was designed. All the text will be readable and some of the images may be displayed. To see it this way, just temporarily disable the flash plugin. All the information of your site, the text and the images and the video is located outside flash. It can be accessed without the flash plugin. How we present it is another matter.

There is much that can be done to make this version of your site a little prettier and more functional for the small portion of the market that will visit on their iPad. I say small portion, but it is getting bigger at present. One of my clients that receives about 6000 visits per month in a travel based industry (more people will use their portable devices to reserach travel destinations because they may be already on the road), received

• just under 10% from iPhones and
• just under 4% of them from iPads.
• Meanwhile 71% of them were still from windows based machines and
• 13% from Macintosh-based machines

If you want to learn more about what we can do to your non-flash site, please call me for a chat about it.

Kind regards…

This fix is for both the upload image dialog and the browser module of FCKeditor

The problem is that emails need images to be referenced bu abosulte (not relative) URLs otherwise the client application doesn’t know which domain the image is to be found in. You can manually add the domain name to the fron tof the image scr tag but if you forget, the email will appear with nasty red crosses in it instead of beautiful images.

the file to change is in FCKeditor/editor/dialog/fck_image

the function is SetUrl about line 849. Fist we declare a new variable to hold the domain name which we later use. Both changes are marked in red. This work is not mine, I’m merely referencing it here for my own purposes.

var theDomain = ‘http://’ + location.hostname;

function SetUrl( url, width, height, alt )

{

if ( sActualBrowser == ‘Link’ )

{

GetE(‘txtLnkUrl’).value = url ;

UpdatePreview() ;

}

else

{

//change from this GetE(‘txtUrl’).value = url ; to the following
GetE(‘txtUrl’).value = theDomain + url ;

GetE(‘txtWidth’).value = width ? width : ” ;

GetE(‘txtHeight’).value = height ? height : ” ;

if ( alt )

GetE(‘txtAlt’).value = alt;

UpdatePreview() ;

UpdateOriginal( true ) ;

}

This promblem occurs in AS3 when you’re sending and loading data through a URLrequest like this

var myData:URLRequest = new URLRequest(“http://www.mydomain.com/somescript.php”)
myData.method = URLRequestMethod.POST
var variables:URLVariables = new URLVariables()
variables.password = “somepassword”;
myData.data = variables
var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader()
loader.dataFormat = URLLoaderDataFormat.VARIABLES
loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, dataOnLoad)
loader.load(myData)
function dataOnLoad(evt:Event){

trace (loader.data.someVar)

}

The variable if it is a string say comma delimited, will have no commas. It is because you didn’t send any variables ie you didn’t include the line in red.

Usually when you set up a button listener in actionscript 3 it listens for a mouse event and then fires a function. That functions needs to have the mouse event set as a parameter like this book now buttom function:

bookNow.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN,setupBooking);

function setupBooking(event:MouseEvent){

//this is where the functions methods are written

}

The problem is that if I want to call that function from some other place in my code, like from within another function, ie.

setupBooking();

the error fires saying “expecting 1 argument but it received 0.”

The way around this is to declare the argument as null in the function definition, like this:

function setupBooking(event:MouseEvent=null){

}

then we can call it with or without an argument.