Customize control bar

[DanMan]

Hi,

I think it is completely essential to be able to customize the control bar, either by selecting / unselecting the buttons to appear, changing the colour of the control bar, or by adding a swf replacement.

I realise that at the moment it's not possible to do this.

Could you release the .fla file that you are using as a source for the swf control bars that are there (there are only 3 of them) so that alternatives can be developed by the community and possibly returned to you to further improve the product. The ones that are provided are really only just-ok. There really do need to be some cleaner more modern themes for the control bar.

What do you think?

[James]

DanMan,

If you would like the .fla files to play with and provide alternate options, we will certainly be interested in what you can create.
Our ViewletBuilder/ViewletQuiz products are a little easier to drop in new Skins than ViewletCam at the moment.

We would need to rebuild the EXE to add new skins to ViewletCam.

James

[DanMan]

What I have done instead, is to save without the progress bar, and to separately develop a flash file that:

1. Shows a loading progress indicator
2. Loads in the external swf into a movie clip
3. While loading, update progress based on bytes loaded
4. When loaded show the movie
5. Provide a separate control bar with my company's branding and colours
6. This separate control bar also includes some advanced stuff not on your control bar.

It's going to be a pain to have to get you to recompile stuff just to enable a new style. Your control bars are not pretty. (not meaning to be critical). Ideally, like the flash video, you would be able to choose a basic theme that looks nice (white, black) and then ideally to choose a colour theme - any colour and then the control bar adapts to that. Also to be able to toggle off the volume and add in a logo.

My solution works very well. I think your software is doing the job but would be great to see a new version with advanced features such as those I am talking about because that would be the icing on the cake. Cheers.

[M.Barry]

It's not the easiest thing to do in the world, but yes, it is possible to add a button to the control bar. You can access the control bar's movie clip through the view.skin['controlbar'] property, manipulate its children and add new children. For example, here's some code that inserts a new button to the right of the control bar:

public function initializePlugin(vie:AbstractView) : void {
view = vie;

var button : MovieClip = this.customButton;
this.removeChild(button);

var controlbar = view.skin['controlbar'];
controlbar.addChild(button);

controlbar['timeSlider'].width = controlbar['timeSlider'].width - button.width - 5;

button.x = controlbar['timeSlider'].x + controlbar['timeSlider'].width;
button.y = controlbar['timeSlider'].y;

}

If you do this however, you'll notice that the icon doesn't resize with the player. In order to do that, you'll need to use the com.jeroenwijering.utils.Stacker class to resize the control bar containing your new button:

public function initializePlugin(vie:AbstractView) : void {
...
stacker = new Stacker(controlbar);
view.addControllerListener(ControllerEvent.RESIZE, resizeHandler);
}

private function resizeHandler(evt:ControllerEvent=null):void {
var wid : Number = view.config['width'];
trace(wid);
stacker.rearrange(wid);
}