DzignSpace Blog

Just finished off the site redesign for Seesaw Studios, and I’m really happy with the results. It was my first use of SWFAddress, which enables not only deep-linking of Flash content but the BACK and NEXT browser buttons as well, and it works way better than my own query-string-based solution I worked out for my own site back in 2006.

Works well, that is, after I finally figured out how to use it…as open source, it’s not particularly well-documented. By which I mean, not documented…unless you consider mere factual statements as documentation. Think of it like getting a new universal remote, and the instruction booklet consists of helpful how-to’s such as:

Play Button: This is the Play Button
Stop Button: This is the Stop Button
Et Cetera

On top of that, I happened to pick one of the more complicated site structures to implement SWFAddress…namely, a dynamic (in this case XML-driven) site. And then I had to basically reverse my normal thought process: instead of clicking on a button to generate a sub-menu to go to a page, going to a page has to generate the sub-menu. Meaning each page has to know which menu button(s) point to it, rather than each button knowing which page it points to. But finally, after all that, as well as some good-ol’ JavaScript debugging, the system is working.

I’m going to have to implement it on my own site sometime. Along with a similar content-tagging system that Seesaw is using. My site is starting to feel a little old to me. I’ll be sure to get right on it.

The Seessaw site:
http://www.seesawstudios.com/

And some sample deep links:
http://www.seesawstudios.com/#/work/tags/branded%20content/poptech_found/
http://www.seesawstudios.com/#/about-process/
http://www.seesawstudios.com/#/contact/