Mini-Project 2 - Animated Menus Summary
This project only served to reinforce my opinion that Flash has NO business whatsoever as a navigation menu. I have not seen one single Flash-based menu that works across all platforms perfectly the way it was intended to be viewed. My main gripes, at least from what I've seen:
- Hyperlinks cannot be relative, only absolute.
- What you see in the Flash stage is NOT what you get. Trying to restrict everything to the 175 pixels my site uses is next to impossible, and my text looks blurry as a result.
- My menu system doesn't even work properly - submenus overlap each other, not fading off screen fast enough.
- Flash-based navigation severely slows down page load times, which I never approve of, especially on a 56k who probably should not be running Flash-supported browsers in the first place, which in turn defeats the whole purpose of having a Flash-based menu system.
- It's a hell of a lot easier and faster to design a menu system using individual graphics in HTML than it is to work with Flash!!!
Ranting aside, here is the breakdown of the project. I had to make twenty-six raw graphics for the buttons using Fireworks and I really thank whomever came up with the idea to allow you to have folders to sort your library. Each submenu had its own timeline, which was nested inside the parent menu, and that inside the parent menu, which was a lot of timelines to keep track of. I used a lot of duplicating and swapping symbols for one another, which was really tedious and took up most of my time once I figured out how to make the menus actually show up.
Unfortunately, although the menus show up, they will not go away, no matter what I tried. Therefore their submenus overlap each other, which makes for a very ugly menu system, not to mention that Flash doesn't show you where to line them up properly so they look "right". It was frustrating and I basically gave up after literally hours of trying to perfect it. Also, sub-menu links are not clickable, for some reason - no matter what I did, only the top level menu is clickable. I suppose I'll have to go in to talk to Mrs. Doubleday tomorrow and see what I can do about it.
I honestly cannot think of any benefits to a Flash-based navigation system other than "it looks good". Sometimes looking good is not worth the hours of effort you put into it, only to have the end user never seeing it because they don't have Flash or have turned Flash off/blocked, like I do. What a gigantic waste of effort. HTML is entirely cross-platform, everyone can see it, everyone can use it, and even if they turn off graphics, that's what the [alt] tag is for. In the hands of someone who programs Flash every day as part of their job, however, he or she could possibly make it very good, much better than I can, but I'm not intending to make Flashes for a living.
Like HTML, it is possible to open a page in a new window in Flash by using Actionscript: getURL(url [, window [, "variables"]]) property, where you would replace window with the same window variables HTML uses (_self, _blank, _parent, and _top).
Lastly, I tried to make my Flash as simple as possible, using only alpha transparency to make the stars "blink" and the submenu text fade in. Sure, I could have gone all-out and done something fancy like this bug menu, but I don't really have the time because I have other homework. I just wish the text wasn't so blurry in the menu. Oh well.