I want to create a website displaying grid-sorted videos (interviews - movies showed in rows and columns). I want it to be 'a page with talking heads'. When users clicks on a video it starts playing.
I consider two ways:
The whole website made in flash - dynamically assigned number of videos per row/column and page, depending on the user's screen resolution.
Website made in php/html with help of JS and CSS - videos are displayed by YouTube player or other player e.g. JW Player - videos position depends on screen resolution.
What do you think - which way is better (consider performance too, please)?
Have you got any other ideas?
Thank you in advance.
My opinion is that you have to use option 2. Creating HTML and CSS is much easier than Actionscript and as PimPee said Flash components are slower. I don't know any big commercial or entertainment site made entirely in Flash so my opinion is that you have to use PHP/HTML.
Also many Flash features could be replicated by using JS/Jquery which works faster and is easier to maintain. There is no point of creating sliders,dropdowns or other web behaviour functionalities in Flash when you can use Jquery. You should use Flash if you desire very sophisticated animation efects.
I'd say number 2.
Since Flash is kind of slow and doesn't work on an ipad / iphone etc.
But that's just my opinion :)
Related
Im currently building a practice responsive website, what I am doing is taking an exising website, building it up using twitter bootsrap js and css, meaning it will be fully responsive for mobile.
The issue is that there are some large carousels and images on the site. Ideally I would like to just completely remove certain elements, like a carousel for instance, and instead have the options within the carousel as a standard list menu.
It seems the main option is display:none based on media queries, but I am starting to foresee that I will run into big problems for loading time if the entire desktop site is still going to be loaded on the mobile, only elements hidden.
Are there ways to completely exclude html based on browser size? If anyone has any good links or articles that would be great. Or even just opinions, on whether there is actually need to exclude html or not.
Thank you
First off it is really good to see that although you're talking about display:none; you actually still want to display the content without the bells and whistles of the image. Well done you.
The next thing I would look at is if you don't want to load images for a mobile then why are you adding it for the larger sites. If the image isn't providing a function, assisting in explaining the content better, then why not just drop it for the desktop size as well?
If in fact it does help tell a story then you can include the images and some of the popular image services like adaptive images, hiSRC, or PictureFill which will serve the mobile version of the image first and replace with a larger image at higher viewports (but remember, there's no bandwidth test).
Finally, if you do want to serve some different content, then take the advice of fire around including more content with ajax. The South Street toolbox from Filament group can help you out, pay particular attention to the AjaxInclude pattern (it also has a link to the picturefill).
You could consider storing heavy data JSON-encoded, and then creating elements and loading them on demand like so
var heavyImage = new Image();
heavyImage.src=imageList[id];
Then you can append image element to a desired block. From my experience with mobiles this is more robust than requesting <img> via AJAX, since AJAX could be pretty slow sometimes.
You may also 'prefetch' images with this method (like 2-3 adjacent to visible at the moment), thus improving UX.
You could pull in the heavy elements via AJAX so they wouldn't sit on the page initially, making it load faster. You could decide to do the AJAX call only if the screen size is larger than X.
If you want you can use visibility:hidden, or if you use jQuery you can use
$(element).remove() //to remove completely
$(element).hide() //to hide
$(element).fadeOut(1) //to fadeout
I am sure this question has been asked but I can't find anything that suits.
I need continuous audio playback throughout page loads. I do not want to use flash or frames and I know this is possible due to the arise of the next soundcloud. Flash is a pain and frames would destroy my navigation buttons etc. You can't even take a look at soundclouds markup so I really have no idea how they've done it but it's impressive.
I would like to know how soundcloud has done this or a way to do this? To be honest I am intrigued by the new soundcloud and would love to take a look at there code but I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen
Soundcloud is probably using the new HTML5 history API for their magic. But implementing this is not as easy as putting your site into an iframe.
Here is a really great introduction to the API: http://diveintohtml5.info/history.html
I am also currently looking at this for a musician site that needs continuous audio playback whilst traversing through the site. If you are developing with Wordpress, I notice there are a few Wordpress themes that have been recently released to support this.
I have a feeling however that the continuous audio functions in these are supplied via Soundcloud - not 100% sure yet until I have a play with them in the coming weeks.
I'm thinking about setting up a website (based on WordPress) to host video tutorials on interpreting CT scans.
In addition to simply letting the visitor view PowerPoint presentation videos, I'm keen on writing some sort of simple app that I can embed in the blog to allow the visitor to scroll through a series of images (i.e. a scan).
I usually code in REALbasic or Objective-C. I have some experience with PHP. What are my language options for making an interactive embeddable image viewer in a blog? The website needs to be able to be viewed on an iPad as well as normal desktop browsers.
Javascript.
Pick up jQuery, or a similar Javascript framework. It will help you get down to business faster.
What you are asking has nothing to do with server-side coding. It is all client-side. Because of that, your choices are something to do with a plugin (such as Flash), or Javascript. If you want it to work on an iPad, Flash and other plugins are out.
Since you need your image viewer to work on the iPad, ActionScript3, hence, Flash is out of the picture. I would use JavaScript as per the examples on the Apple HTML5 advocacy site, using the canvas element to render the viewer.
I would lean towards a javascript solution. There are loads of libraries out there that will give you a kickstart. If you know some example works of what you are thinking about doing, we can give you pros and cons for serverside vs. client side languages. Additionally, you can use html5 for a lot, but then again it depends on what exactly you are wanting to do.
I want to use a flash preloader for my php website. I have seen some javascript examples; but I want something attractive and cool. So I want use flash preloader which will show the percentage of the website loaded.My website is kinda heavy(with lot of images). It looks bad when the contents load. So I want to show a flash preloader while the site loads. Any help?
If you have a working javascript example it would not be that hard to change it so it calls a flash movie and tell it to update a progressbar or whatever.
Some example code can be found here:
http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/flashjscommand/
Not sure about the coolness of a flash preloader though. :)
instead of adding some annoying and useless flash-stuff you should think about optimizing your site to load faster so you don't need a loading-indicator (there are some nice artices on this on code.google.com) - i don't want to sound offensive, but if a site isn't loaded within a maximum of 2-3 seconds, a lot of users will be annoyed, leave your site and never come back, even if you have the coolest loading-bar ever.
what would be nice to know is waht makes your site so big. the biggest site i can think of is some kind of image-gallery, but even in that case, there is a much easier solution: show thumbnails of your pictures and open the "big" version only on clicking these.
Gallery - http://schnell.dreamhosters.com/wallpapers.php
The purpose of this gallery is simple - store a lot of wallpapers and sort them by resolution and/or aspect ratio for people to browse and download as they like. There's a few features I've wanted to work in, but I'm not quite sure how best to do them or how to do them at all. The presentation is in HTML 4, CSS, Javascript and jQuery + plugins. The work behind the scenes is done in PHP.
1 - Make the images downloadable without 'Save Image As...'. Right now I'm using a contrivance whereby clicking the Download link in the bottom-right of each image's box opens a new box with instructions telling the user to 'Right Click. Save Image As...'. I'd like to avoid this entirely if possible.
2 - Make the searching and sorting faster and more efficient. Right now all the images are stored in a folder on my webspace and I use a shell command and a lot of fancy filtering in PHP to get the images I want based on the filters (the page number I'm on and the aspect ratio or resolution I chose). I thought of maybe doing something with MySQL, but I haven't quite figured out yet how I'd do that and maintain the structure my page has.
3 - Make the images load faster. There's probably no easy coding solution to this, so this one is more of a 'I wish' than a 'I want to'.
4 - Improve the layout. This one is more subjective and 'artsy' I suppose, but any suggestions would be nice.
5 - An upload system. Give the ability to upload your own wallpapers and maybe include a short description or some tags. I have absolutely no idea how to handle this as I've never worked with uploading of files before. And this also leads to...
6 - A tagging system or some other type of user-made sorting system. Again, no experience here.
Any insight on any of these issues would be great, and feel free to throw in any suggestions of your own.
Send the files with the MIME type "application/octet-stream" to make a browser download rather than display them
It would definitely be better to store information about the images in a database rather than exploring the filesystem
The images really aren't loading slowly for me, so I can't really suggest anything here. If your site gets larger (much larger) you might want to look into CDNs
The layout is OK but it needs some design, it's incredibly plain at the moment. It would also be nice to see more information on the images - what they are of, where they're from, who made them, etc (don't forget: correct copyright attribution)
You probably want to read the PHP handbook section on handling file uploads. To handle description and tags, you'll definitely want a database of some sort.
Also not hard if you have a correctly formed database. If you've never designed a schema before you probably want to learn a little about normalisation and many-to-many relationships to do the tags.
Lastly you didn't ask for it, but it'd be nice if it were possible to have the same image in multiple resolutions (quite common on image sites - think Flickr, Deviantart, etc).