Spotmenu 2 - synchronise between two menus

[Amoscowdog]

Hi Tommy,

I'm using Spotmenu 2 and I've got two menus arranged so that they appear to be one with a title header (Rock Lodge) between them. I'd like to use 'selectMode=1' and I'm wondering if there is a way to disable the selected title in one menu when you select one in the other.

http://ssi.maxoom.com.au/erez/erez?src=//webqem/maxoom/tony/spotmenu2.jpg&tmp=Medium

Screengrab showing two menu items selected.

Can I use a function in Panologic?

Tony

[allSaints]

Tony,

I have made a new version (1.3) of the spotmenu plugin with two new additions. You can choose which one of them you prefer to use:


A new action "unselect" which can be used to unselect any previously selected menu item.
A new menu item attribute heading="1". This is for inserting headings in your menu items list. Which means you don't need to synchronize two separate menus.


Plugin page is here (http://wirestam.com/panos/Flash/plugins/spotmenu.html).

Tommy

[Amoscowdog]

That's fantastic Tommy! I just quickly tried out the 'unselect' command and it works a treat, perfect.

I haven't tried the Heading = 1 yet.

Tony

[Amoscowdog]

Hi Tommy,

I just tried the "heading" attribute and it allows you set the headings in a single menu perfectly.

The only issue however is when you apply an alpha setting, by rolling out of the spotmenu, everything in the menu with the exception of the "heading" displays the alpha setting.

http://ssi.maxoom.com.au/erez/erez?src=//webqem/maxoom/tony/spotmenu2%5Falpha.jpg&tmp=Medium

Screengrab showing over and out states

Tony

[allSaints]

Sorry Tony,

I never seem to learn that the text component in Flash is a bit special and needs to be treated differently in certain ways. :)

The text field alpha will work in the 1.3.1 (http://wirestam.com/panos/Flash/plugins/spotmenu.html) version.

Tommy

[Virtualguide]

Tony, should I have "like" button as in Facebook, I would pressed it for each of your answer. You're so fast. Thanks a lot
:)

[Amoscowdog]

Hi Virtualguide,

I think you probably meant Tommy not Tony :???: and yes Tommy is so fast at answering and solving our problems :p

Tony

[Amoscowdog]

Hi Tommy,

Here's the link to the presentation, http://www.redsquare.com/360/ulusaba at the moment I'm still using the two menus stacked on top of each other but as soon as I get a free minute or two I'll try converting it to a single menu.

I'm working on a mac and I had the menus sized perfectly and I thought I was ready to go live. When I checked it on a PC both of the menus had scroll bars as the text had larger spacing than on the mac version. I did some resizing of the backgrounds to remove the scroll bar and fit for both mac and PC.

Here's the result;

http://ssi.maxoom.com.au/erez/erez?src=//webqem/maxoom/tony/spotmenu%5Fcomparison.tif&tmp=Medium

Tony

[allSaints]

Tony,

I'm no font expert, but the fonts do look slightly different. I don't even know if it is Trebuchet MS as you have selected. And if you don't have that font installed, a similar font will be selected. I don't have a Mac myself, so I can't say if fonts ordinarily differ between PC's and Mac's.

When I run your tour in Firefox with the Flash Debug Player, I get an error message:
SecurityError: Error #2000: There is no active security context

Then the Flash Debug Player completely hangs my browser, which is not your fault, as it seems to happen almost every time I get an error message now. This behaviour started with Flash 10.1.

But viewing it in IE, your tour looks very good - and the menu seems to work OK. :)

Tommy

[Amoscowdog]

Hi,

Yes it's probably a font issue, I'll try something more standard like Arial or Vendana and let you know how I go.

In regard to the Flash Debug Player error here's some information about it on Adobe's Bug and Issue Management system http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-4006 Hope it helps.

FYI the tour also includes the following most excellent plugins:

panologic (can't live without it)
logometer (ditto)
htmlbox2 and
textbox

Tony

[zakato]

Hi Tony,

I've really liked your menu style with the thumbnails above ... clever! Only thing that messed me up a bit (from a user point of view) was the hand cursor at the title headers too (I kept on clicking there too) ... but I reckon it's something that we'll have to learn to leave with! ;)

Very nice tour by the way!

On my pc I do too get a message from the debugger and then firefox hangs (which, as Prof. AllSaints already mention, is happening quite often these days), with msexplorer I get the message but it plays. On mac it plays fine.

From what I recall (and I might be completely wrong) Trebuchet MS is a pc font only ... so on mac there will have to be some sort of conversion ... I am not expert at all in fonts ... just know they are tricky!

regards,

Antonio

[allSaints]

Antonio,

if you look at my test page (http://wirestam.com/panos/Flash/spotmenu/smtest2.html), you can see that there is no hand cursor on the headings in menu 1 and menu 5 - only on clickable items.

My hotspots looks like this:
<spot id="menu5" url="../spotmenu.swf" static="1" salign="TC" align="TC" staticX="-150" staticY="10"
alpha="0.5" mouseChildren="1" blockMouse="1" disableKeys="0" disableControls="0"
onOver="alpha=1,300;pano.disableWheel=1; pano.disableKeys=1"
onOut="alpha=0.5,600;pano.disableWheel=0; pano.disableKeys=0"
xmlFile="menu25.xml"
/>

Tommy

[Amoscowdog]

Hi Tommy & Antonio,

Okay I've modified the menus and I'm using the new functionality in Version 3.1 for a single menu with Headings and I've got the same mouseover functionality as Tommy's example.

http://www.redsquare.com/360/ulusaba

Trebuchet MS is installed on both the mac and the pc but I'm still seeing rendering differences, this maybe something one just has to live with.

I guess the alternative would be to detect for mac or pc and have different menu.xml files.

Tony

[allSaints]

Tony,

I think it looks really nice now.

And I agree with Antonio about the thumbnails above the menu. That was the first thing I noticed with your implementation - and I like it a lot! :)

Tommy

[zakato]

Nice Tony! ... really nice pano page overall ... I really like it! did you use any flashificator?

By the way, i have noticed that the unfolded menu does not display on first load ... you only see the header and need to close and open it again so that it shows. Not sure if this is the supposed behaviour, if is not maybe you could have it hide at first and show on pano load.

(flash debugger keeps on complaining on pc ... works fine on mac safari+firefox)

regards,

Antonio

[Amoscowdog]

Hi Antonio,

I use Flashificator as a test platform to create snippets, test out different effects but overall hand coding. For my little panos on my blog http://www.tonyredhead.com/pages/african-adventure-360-panoramas I use a template created in Flashificator and just drop in the cubes.

I use Panologic quite a bit e.g the state of the navigation menu is managed in Panologic, if the menu is collapsed and the whole UI is hidden, when the UI is shown the menu stays collapsed and vice versa.

I'm not seeing the missing menu issue at all and I've checked on both PC and Mac. I was playing around a bit with it yesterday and you may have a cached version of it in the browser. Could you clear the browser and check again, I'd appreciate it.

Tony

[Amoscowdog]

Hi,

Okay I've added this line to the code to the pano.html page that is called into the iframe on the main page.

'flashvars.xml_file = (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Mac')>-1) ? "files/xml/ulusaba_mac.xml" : "files/xml/ulusaba_pc.xml" ;'

Each of the .xml files opens a menu.xml file with slightly different sizes for the menu. I also had to modify the location of the rollover icon buttons in each xml file. So it's all a bit messy now but I'll see if there's a cleaner way of doing it.

http://ssi.maxoom.com.au/erez/erez?src=//webqem/maxoom/tony/comp%5Fnew.tif&tmp=Medium

Tony

[zakato]

Hi Tony,

Sorry for late response!


I use Panologic quite a bit e.g the state of the navigation menu is managed in Panologic, if the menu is collapsed and the whole UI is hidden, when the UI is shown the menu stays collapsed and vice versa.


interesting ... thanks for the tip!


I'm not seeing the missing menu issue at all and I've checked on both PC and Mac. I was playing around a bit with it yesterday and you may have a cached version of it in the browser. Could you clear the browser and check again, I'd appreciate it.


It actually happens when cache is empty. I have just checked it again (safari5.0.3 - osx10.6.6) and same behaviour. Although the menu is open I can only see the header ... if I collapse and expand it behaves ok from then on. If i reload the page for a second time (once it's already cached) it doesn?t happen.


Each of the .xml files opens a menu.xml file with slightly different sizes for the menu. I also had to modify the location of the rollover icon buttons in each xml file. So it's all a bit messy now but I'll see if there's a cleaner way of doing it.


This is a nice and simple platform customisation! ... but from my user point of view I can recall seeing anything "extrange" with the menu from one platform to another prior to this mod (at the cost of an extra xml file) ... text can be very tricky ... but I think the attention kind of goes more to the "rotating" picture.

Anyway I guess it is all these kind of small details that make a tour stand over others.

regards,

Antonio

[Amoscowdog]

Hi Antonio,

Thanks for checking it again. I've just tested it on the same browser and OS on my Macbook Pro and for me it's working fine. I'll get some others to test it and see what they say, it's a bit of a mystery.

Tony