When You Can Cut-and-Paste the Pebble From My Hand

If you've got the "gist" of the whole net thing, then we're ready to paste in our script that launches the fullscreen movie. (This is actually the easiest part of the whole mess, but like so many things, simply getting something to work is at best half the project).

Download full.zip, which contains the guts of our fullscreen trick. You have two files, full.html and exit.html. Exit.html is nothing more than a window that closes itself when loaded. You will remember from constructing our Flash movie that we designated this as the document to which we point the browser when we want to exit fullscreen mode. So when the user clicks "exit" in the Flash movie, the (fullscreen) browser window loads exit.html and closes itself, leaving the user looking at...

Full.html: this is the actual trick. You waded through all that windy discourse just to get to this. Maybe it's worth it - maybe not. (The point is: if you are going to use tricks, do it right). The JS in this document launches a file that you specify in fullscreen mode. Notice that we have designated an .swf file - and not an HTML file - as the location to open. This means that the new browser window will open the Flash movie - in fullscreen mode - and scale it to the dimensions of the window. (Note that the original movie is 300px by 400px, which should scale very well on just about any screen). Also note that you should have some kind of interesting content on full.html, (but not so interesting that user bookmarks the page, since the JS in the document will launch the fullscreen plex_02.swf every time it is loaded), since the user will come back to this page at some point; and the layout of this page will affect the user's impression of Bubba's site, (i.e. it looks B-A-D to have a piece of a fractured JS showing when the user exits your fullscreen Flash movie).

Recap: Here is the flow of events once the user reaches full.html

• The JS opens a new (fullscreen) window, containing plex_02.swf.
• Full.html remains open in the background.
• User views Bubba's showtimes.
• User may launch another browser window to go to the movie's official site.
• User hits the "exit" button, which points the fullscreen window to exit.html.
• Exit.html closes itself and the user is looking at full.html.
  

It would have been just as easy to skip the exit.html step and attach the following actionscript to the exit button in the Flash movie, (and in fact there are very good Flash designers who do it this way):

On (Release)

	Get URL ("javascript:self.close")
End On

However, this leaves the user looking at a scrap of script on a blank white page upon exit. The movie would yield this result just as reliably as the exit.html solution. But as we mentioned before, neither Bubba nor his customers are concerned with our scripts. It just looks like the app crashed or didn't quite do what it was supposed to. Cyber-hypochondriacs will flood poor Bubba's inbox with flames on how his website caused all kinds of problems with their machines.

...Just got off the phone with Bubba. He's looking at the site and he loves it. He says he had no problem changing the showtimes directly from his browser. He said he would tell me more about it, but Luanne needed to use the phone.

Bubba says the check is in the mail.

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