Hey guys,
I've been using Flash for quite a while, but mostly for cartoon animations and some simple web pages. But today I was messing around and following a simple tutorial for making a Flash-based drop down menu to try something a client had asked me about. So I created a test navigation menu with big buttons just to play with. Now the problem isn't with the menu itself (since I followed the tutorial it worked without a problem), but rather how it can be viewed on a page.
My problem is that I want the menu to be longer vertically than the Stage area, and still appear on the page, so it'll "break out" of the Flash stage. This is a little hard to explain so please bare with me.
Say I have the Flash menu exported .swf file that's 550 x 400 pixels, the standard size. Now my menu when collapsed, and expanded will fit perfectly with plenty of space to spare. But, all that space is wasted because the Flash area is 550 x 400 wide on the HTML page. This takes up a huge chunk of space. Now this wouldn't be a problem if the Menu was on an Flash based page (since it would just be a symbol inside of the big Flash site). But, I need to use this Flash menu on an HTML page, so the Flash area can't be huge since other things will need to be on the page.
So for example, if I restricted the area to a 500 x 100 pixel Flash stage area. This will allow the space for the menu to show when collapsed (Yes the size is crazy but this is just an example), but when you roll over the menu it can expand downward "breaking" out of the stage onto the page over all the other content on the page. Now I've seen this done before on some web pages with banner ads but, I'm not sure if this is a Flash trick or some sort of HTML layering thing.
Like Apple's iPod ads with the dancing people in it, there was a Flash banner version of this on a few pages I've seen where if you hovered over it, the animation spread out a bit over the page. Not taking over the whole page, but it seemed like it was "breaking out" of the stage area and over a border they had around it.
If anyone knows how something like this could be made I would really appreciate it. Because a client insists on having a Flash-based menu on an HTML page, but the only way I can think of it now it would take up the entire page or end up cropping the menu too short.
Now of course I can make the menu smaller and not nearly as big so it might be able to fit in a small non-intrusive Flash area, but I'm still curious if this can be done since I've seen it before. If it's way too much trouble I could just be honest with them and suggest an HTML-type menu.
Here's an example of the menu in a stage area that is too small to display all of the menu choices. I turned transparency off so you can see where the Flash stage ends (White area) http://stevenmatarazzo.com/web-menu.html
Any help or information on this would be great
Thanks!
-Steven
I've been using Flash for quite a while, but mostly for cartoon animations and some simple web pages. But today I was messing around and following a simple tutorial for making a Flash-based drop down menu to try something a client had asked me about. So I created a test navigation menu with big buttons just to play with. Now the problem isn't with the menu itself (since I followed the tutorial it worked without a problem), but rather how it can be viewed on a page.
My problem is that I want the menu to be longer vertically than the Stage area, and still appear on the page, so it'll "break out" of the Flash stage. This is a little hard to explain so please bare with me.
Say I have the Flash menu exported .swf file that's 550 x 400 pixels, the standard size. Now my menu when collapsed, and expanded will fit perfectly with plenty of space to spare. But, all that space is wasted because the Flash area is 550 x 400 wide on the HTML page. This takes up a huge chunk of space. Now this wouldn't be a problem if the Menu was on an Flash based page (since it would just be a symbol inside of the big Flash site). But, I need to use this Flash menu on an HTML page, so the Flash area can't be huge since other things will need to be on the page.
So for example, if I restricted the area to a 500 x 100 pixel Flash stage area. This will allow the space for the menu to show when collapsed (Yes the size is crazy but this is just an example), but when you roll over the menu it can expand downward "breaking" out of the stage onto the page over all the other content on the page. Now I've seen this done before on some web pages with banner ads but, I'm not sure if this is a Flash trick or some sort of HTML layering thing.
Like Apple's iPod ads with the dancing people in it, there was a Flash banner version of this on a few pages I've seen where if you hovered over it, the animation spread out a bit over the page. Not taking over the whole page, but it seemed like it was "breaking out" of the stage area and over a border they had around it.
If anyone knows how something like this could be made I would really appreciate it. Because a client insists on having a Flash-based menu on an HTML page, but the only way I can think of it now it would take up the entire page or end up cropping the menu too short.
Now of course I can make the menu smaller and not nearly as big so it might be able to fit in a small non-intrusive Flash area, but I'm still curious if this can be done since I've seen it before. If it's way too much trouble I could just be honest with them and suggest an HTML-type menu.
Here's an example of the menu in a stage area that is too small to display all of the menu choices. I turned transparency off so you can see where the Flash stage ends (White area) http://stevenmatarazzo.com/web-menu.html
Any help or information on this would be great
Thanks!
-Steven
