Posted on Wednesday, August 08th (6881 days ago)

In days gone by, a flash slideshow was a staple on any one of my homepages.  It allowed me to paint a deeper picture using more than one photograph, arranging them in a sequence that tells a story.

Then one day I stopped putting them on pages.  Why?

Looking back I realize it was a step taken to ensure a couple things.

 
1. Keeping any information within the flash file from being skipped by google.
 
2. Valid code saved from the obscene "object" and "embed" tags that were usually needed.
 
3. Circumvent the "click to activate control" messages in Internet Explorer.
    

While these were all nice reasons, the slideshow is still quite powerful.  I cannot be denied.  There had to be a  way to use the flash slideshow and still follow the guide lines above.

Enter our old friend javascript.

Using a splash of javascript when the page loads, I can check for the flash player, and replace a section of the page with the slideshow.

In this case, I’m replacing text and a regular image with the flash if the user has the player installed.  If they don’t have the flash player, or if javascript is turned off, the user gets the image and regular text - so does google.

Since the flash code is added to the page after its rendered by the browser, there’s no pesky "click to activate control" messages either.

Everyone wins.  Almost.

In the time I had taken off from using flash regularly, I had forgotten about the mystery pixel.

Yes, the mystery pixel.  Its the 1 pixel that gets added to the left edge of your movie when you import images (at least in version 7 Professional, it may be fixed by now).

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About Joseph R. B. Taylor

Joseph R. B. Taylor is a humble designer/developer who makes stuff for screens of all shapes and sizes. He is currently the lead UI/UX Architect at MScience, LLC, where he works to create simple experiences on top of large rich datasets for their customers and clients.