Slow loading & Buttons not working

programming flash
1

Hi guys.

I’ve built a site for one of my customers, just a basic brochure site, and I used the sliding dock menu I bought on Flashden which is XML driven as a nav on the contact page.

Problem is, on that page once its all loaded, it seems to be still talking to the server and wont let me press any of the main navigation buttons!!

Im not sure what do do! Any ideas?

Cheers :slight_smile:

Linky

2

Haggis pizza?? It’ll be deep-fried Mars Bar pizza next…

Buttons work here although the page content is slow in loading. It might be down to your XML file as that won’t parse properly when I try to look at it…some error messages “Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet” and “Whitespace is not allowed at this location”.

You could also try preloading the content. While this won’t make it any quicker overall, it will remove the illusion that it’s taking a while to download the images. Optimising the images will also speed things up. Most of them are around 28-30kb in size but you should be able to reduce them to 7-8kb without any noticable degradation in quality.

3

If I’m preloading the images, do I do that in the same frame as the menu or do I as that in a new frame beforehand?

And how do I make the XML file ok? All help MUCHOS appreciated!

…off to look at reducing the size of the images :slight_smile:

FLA

4

When you said the buttons work ok…do you mean the pizza ones or can you actually navigate out of the section with the buttons on the red strip?

Cheers :slight_smile:

5

Ok Ive located the problem to the use of _global in the dock menu code affecting all other buttons.

_global.onRollOverThumb = function(what){
    tracer.text = what.B_name;
"+what.B_icon+" | icon link: "+what.B_link;

Does anyone have any ideas how I can work around this?

6

I had no problems with the red buttons at all. It was just slow overall and I could navigate through the pizza’s too, but only once they’d loaded. My guess is that the delay is caused because you’re loading the PNG’s externally rather than including them as bitmaps in the SWF. There’s nothing wrong with this but you’re loading 13 pizza images at 30kb each = 400kb to download*. The alternative is to abandon the external loading and include them in the SWF. There are pros and cons to both approaches:

External image loading - SWF is smaller so loads quicker. Can cause a delay if loading a lot of images onto a single frame.
Images in SWF - SWF larger so takes longer to load. Images are visible as soon as they’re placed on the stage.

In my opinion, the latter approach is usually best as people expect SWF’s to take longer to load than a HTML page and you also have the option of building in a preloader if the delay is more than a few seconds. The first approach seems weird to me, as the SWF loads quickly but then the user is presented with a blank page while the images slowly load.

The basic principle would be to place your preloader on frame 1 and your images on frame 2. When the preloader is complete, it will jump to frame 3. There are a host of tutorials on here, or take a look at www.senocular.com for the low-down on preloading.

  • I see you’ve changed them now so that they’re averaging 10kb each or 130kb. As a result it’s a lot quicker although there will still be a delay displaying the What’s Cooking page for people on dial-up. I’m pretty sure I could cut that in half - in fact, I’ve taken the liberty of reducing them down to a total of 50kb and attaching them in this zip file. If I was really ruthless, I could probably get them down to 30kb :wink:
    Hope that helps.

As for the _global question, I can only say that I’m not having any problems with the buttons whatsoever. So it’s unlikely that altering it would make any difference.

7

Aha…I’ve had more of a play with it and I can see the problems with the buttons. If I get a moment, I’ll take a look at the code and see if I can figure out a solution.

8

That would be very much appreciated!! :slight_smile: