Drop Down Navigation Menu - Tutorial

[slavelle]

I hope it's appropriate for me to post this here as well, since I posted over in the Xara Xtreme forum that I've done a short tutorial about creating drop down menus in your navigation because so many people have expressed issues with it. I created the video with xtreme5 pro, but all of it applies to xwd as well.

I tried to create something to make this as simple and easy to follow as possible with no grouping, soft-grouping, mouseover graphics, etc. Just simple text mouseovers and drop down menus. I describe how to create four buttons and two drop down menus in about 10 minutes.

I plan to follow this up with a few other videos on how to fancy it up a bit and how to incorporate it into a multipage site.

Here's this link: http://www.technicalrs.com/XaraStuff...pDownMenus.htm

mods: would you rather this linked to the post in the other forum? if so, feel free to modify

[steve.ledger]

Hi Scott,

That's fine.
One thing, your flash video seems not to stream, it's a 17mb file which downloads fully to the (any) browser cache before playing.
Are you using Camtasia?

[slavelle]

Yeah. I've had varying degrees of luck with different export formats. I know I probably should be using FLV for this because of the streaming nature and it would allow me to make longer ones without having to connect swf files (16000 frame limit thing). I just haven't found a good option that's free and not a nuisance to get into a xara file.

It would be nice if xara would allow for swf or flv in the swf placeholder spot.

I think I had done an flv export and did something with the swf player part of it and it may have worked...gotta try this again. Was doing videos for another application (Sonar - for audio recording) and did some different experiments.

got a suggestion?

[steve.ledger]

It would be nice if xara would allow for swf or flv in the swf placeholder spot.

XWD and Xtreme do allow for direct .swf (placeholder>>Replace with flash) but not .flv

I use AnyFLV for flash video, it give your the code to use in the place holder.
http://www.talkgraphics.com/showpost...04&postcount=4

I also use FASTSTONE capture (very cheap) which can record screen movies with audio as save as .wmv
You can convert the .wmv with FormatFactory to FLV and use it in AnyFLV if you needed to.

[slavelle]

sledger

I've changed the swf out for flv. Does this work better on your side? It's hard to tell here, as my line is super fast, though it really looks like it's streaming from here in either version - as in the bar is filling up faster than the playing is, but the playing begins WAY before the bar has filled - maybe at 5% full...

Anyway, I hope this works better for people's bandwidth and whatnot.

[steve.ledger]

Still getting the Xara DropDown Menus_controller.swf here Scott using your URL in post#1

source:

<object id="csSWF" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="860" height="584" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,115,0">
<param name="src" value="Xara DropDown Menus_controller.swf"/>
<param name="bgcolor" value="#1a1a1a"/>
<param name="quality" value="best"/>
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/>
<param name="scale" value="showall"/>
<param name="flashVars" value="autostart=false"/>
<embed name="csSWF" src="Xara DropDown Menus_controller.swf" width="860" height="584" bgcolor="#1a1a1a" quality="best" allowScriptAccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" scale="showall" flashVars="autostart=false&thumb=FirstFrame.png&th umbscale=45&color=0x1A1A1A,0x1A1A1A" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></embed>
</object>

[ChrisBro]

Its working for me but its very very slow, just done a speed test to make sure its not me and currently running at just over 3meg but your video stops and starts then crashes

Maybe a lot of views at this time I will try again soon, got to 3 mins in can wait to see the rest

thanks

Chris

[slavelle]

Sledger, the controller is just a small swf that actually is handling the flv in the background. That swf is only 400k, where the FLV is about 21mb.

I wonder if it didn't work better the other way - can't imaging I'm getting that many simultanious views!

[steve.ledger]

Sorry Scott, I wasn't paying attention to the name Was early...

Just trying again, it streams much better here. A few stops and starts, but much better.

[free2saute]

Nice tutorial works fine for me