Maturing Scalable Flash Notices Some Hair

Flash, since its inception, has been the most fascinating area of the internet. With it's ease of use that calls to newbies and it's layers of development abilities to keep professionals continually learning and excited, Flash is one of the most exciting technologies for the web. Well, at least I think so.

One of the latest things I've seen come to age in Flash is the ability to develop a scalable website without that annoying disproportion that you use to get. So what is this scalability you might ask. Here are a couple examples.

http://www.anteprima.com/
Notice how the navigation moves, without scaling yet the background resizes, in proportion to match the size of the browser window. Beautiful.

http://www.madonna.com/
This is an example with less flare but shows the usefulness of resizing the image to keep the dramatic affect.

There are of course better more sophisticated examples out there, but then I would have to go through my list of hundreds of bookmarks to find them. But these two get my point across.

I and a coworker have been talking about harnessing this bit of knowledge for a while and recently have succeeded with some testing. I have to say getting this to work has been one of the most exciting things I've learned about Flash in the past few month and the possibilities of how to use this is endless.

First example of use is how I've applied it to our custom FLV/MP3 player developed in Flash using the MovieDisplay component and all custom controls to allow playing of both FLV and MP3s. The player has always been dynamic since it was first built, so you can easily place it into a page, pass 3 variables to it via the embedded object and play any FLV or MP3. It allows for quick duplication and a setup time of 2 minutes. If you were to re-skin it you would probably be looking at 15-30 minutes. Beats the hell out of spending hours every time you need a new player or the annoyance of having a FLA for each video you want to play.

Now with the scalability put into place, we no longer have a need for doing different sizes in the video player. ONE SIZE FITS ALL! So basically, if you set the player to be 320x260, extra 20 px for height due to controls needs, it resizes to that exact size. Still, if you need a 640x480 player all you have to do is size the embedded object to that size. Full screen? The player can do that as well.

We've already been using this player mixed with AJAX interfaces because of it's acceptance of html variables, and now with this feature, we will have more options with AJAX interfaces. Not to mention the websites we are going to begin to develop with the scalable feature.

At some point I should do a tutorial for this cause when searching the net, there were not many out there and it was surprisingly easy to do.