The Amazing Amazon Application (Part 5)
It's update time again for my Amazon Explorer. Finally you get to see a little bit more information about the books and the other stuff. Wow - I'm amazed how fast the text and scrollbar adjust if you drag the little divider arrow around (at least on my machine).
The info bar contains some goodies: like in the real thing you can click on author names, actors or directors and you will get more results where this person was involved. If there are accessories or related items you will see a link that adds these items to the canvas.
BTW - thanks a lot to the person who actually bought a book through this service. I didn't expect that - nice surprise!
I don't know if I will be a able to do a lot of updates before my holidays, but feedback or ideas are of course always welcome.
Posted at July 29, 2002 10:00 PM | Further reading
Very Nice I am impressed keep up the good work, I am the one that you helped with the google headlines thanks for that
Curt
very cool idea! i usually find flash pretty snappy on my pc, but dragging that divider bar was very slow for me... i would imagine others find it slower. i have some suggestions:
1. hide the text in that area until the user lets go of the bar.
2. not sure of the resizing code you use, but it definately moves the bar first, then it resizes the text and other stuff as you move the mouse. you might try doing it the other way around - resize the text boxes and stuff and move the divider bar last.
also, you might try adding a hairline border around the book images. i serched for a book that has a white cover and it was hard to see.
great work!!!!
Thanks a lot for the constructive feedback! I'll try to implement some of your proposals. Regarding the resize speed it looks like I was relying to much on the horsepower of my 2 GHz machine ;-)
Very cool approach, nice work.
your using some rotation script to draw the connecting lines (finding theta), you can see the script loose coheasion during the on(mouseMove) event. It would probably work better using the new draw funcitons in MX.
otherwise, i think this is one of the coolest things i've ever seen. i've love it. excellent idea. excellent execution. i'm gonna buy stuff through it.
tutash
Yes, I have seen the lag of the lines when you drag something. But this is somehow because the screen doesn't get updated or because of some programming glitch - I am using the drawing functions for the lines.
Hi there,
I am new to Flash and am looking for examples that show how to resize objects without stretching them. Can you guide me to the best resource?
Thanks,
Alan
Hi Alan,
do you want to do this in Actionscript or whilst designing? I'm sure that on http://www.flashkit.com you will find an answer very quickly.
Cheers
Mario
Wow! Love the AmazonExplorer. Are you willing to share the various source codes? Loved to use them. Thanks.
Web
I modified JS Cook Tree to make it use AJAX,
support n level hierarchy. I used this to Display
Amazon Catalogue in a new "innovative" way.
URL :- http://lmap.co.nr/Amazon1.htm
In the tree, one can browse amazon catalogues based
on the browse id. On reaching the item level (marked
with red dots) one can click on it to view details such
as price, image etc.
