Flash With Panache

The Fullscreen Trick

It would be a good idea to learn tricks that you can use on a number of projects, (hint: not mouse trails). The fullscreen effect (opening a Flash movie so that it expands to the full size of the user's desktop - i.e. the only thing visible is your Flash movie) is a good way to employ an all-encompassing design that impresses your ideas on the mind of the user without distraction. When a Flash movie plays inside a browser with toolbars, a location bar, and a status bar, the user is looking at a plugin. An animation, (association is closer to gif89a than custom multimedia app). One of millions and millions of web pages. When the user looks at the same movie fullscreen, the perception is different. The controls for the application are contained within the interface you design, (evidence of browser shell is obscured). The user is now viewing an application. YOUR application (lightning strikes outside window, thunder accompanies maniacal cackling).

IE and NS
Be honest: you design for Internet Explorer and Netscape only. Everyone else can go to hell. Or worse, you slap a "best viewed with" sticker on the front of your creation - now you are designing for one or the other. And you definitely design with a particular type of machine and OS in mind. This type of thinking is generally anathema among serious web developers, but sometimes everyone has to make decisions that will exclude some potential users.

Bubba made it clear in his email outlining the project that he wants anyone to be able to view his movie listings, (his is a small market and he can't afford to lose anyone to compatibility issues). So we need to think this through.

When it comes to the fullscreen effect, our variables are as follows:

• Fullscreen works effortlessly on IE, regardless of platform.
• There are many unique JavaScripts available that perform well on IE.
• At present, you can't easily and reliably get a true fullscreen effect from NS, but
• You can eliminate all traces of the NS browser except a small title bar at the top on Windows machines.
  

The script that we are going to use in this tutorial works for Internet Explorer on any platform. It will also work for other browsers on Windows machines, but not on other OS's.

(Note: for the sake of this article, versions of IE and NS below 4.0 are not considered. Versions of Windows before Win95 are not considered. If you are designing in Flash, you are going to exclude people with outdated machines. Period. You should also consider that a user who hasn't downloaded a FREE browser in years - literally years - will almost certainly get lost trying to install a plugin; and a user that hasn't bought a new computer in 6 to 10 years isn't going to buy anything on your client's site.

You should be very clear with your clients up front about the possibility of excluding older machines).

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