talk about a pain in the ass

Tuesday June 29th 2004 04:09 PM PST

I've been building out pointrolls for a client. If you don't know what a pointroll is, then you should be happy and you should stop reading here. For those of you who didn't take my advise and stop reading, a pointroll is an internet ad banner that expands as a user rolls into it. So a small 728x90 banner at the top of a website will suddenly increase to a size of 728x315. The trick is done with a set of dhtml layers and a lot of javascript magic. Well the big problem is... my banners are all flash. So they actually are not connected in any way. The original banner is also covered by a fucking imagemap, so all mouse control doesn't do shit in this flash movie. So i've got a cludge of code where the original banner and the expansion banner are using local connections to send data back and forth to each other. The original banner never will be able to tell where the mouse is, but the expansion banner is able to track the mouse. SO.... if i want mouse interaction in the original space, i need the expansion banner to tell the original banner where the fuckin mouse is. Its a complete pain in the ass, but i do have to say its opened up a possibility of cool easter eggs. Because each banner uses a local connection, they are literally sending and receiving data. Each one is set to listen, and then reacts when data is received. SO... you could build a group of banners each waiting for a specific connection. In other banners you send that connection. So if two banners were to load on the same page, or two banners at the same time, they could trigger special animations or sequences.

EVEN BETTER

Jason Brian and I have always been screwing around with ECD content that would unlock websites. You could run a flash movie on a CD and link to a web site. The web site flash could then be aware of the original flash running and authenticate user entry. It would be great if flash was a little more secure, otherwise i would really think about using this technique in the future.