imaginLightbox

[.ral:cr]

the first lightbox in flash. the difference is that everything is automatic, and photos are opened in fullscreen.

http://imagin.ro/imaginLightbox/

[.ral:cr]

cs3 sources available.

[Anogar]

I guess it's neat, but I don't see why you'd use it over a traditional lightbox solution. It's really annoying to have to wait for the "Press escape" prompt to go away, and you don't have the same snazzy fade solution like a JS lightbox. Since you're using Flash I would have expected it to be more impressive, not less.

[biznuge]

it's sort of cool in a way, but I think anogar makes a pretty valid point about it not being as far towards a wow as a traditional lightbox page would.

This is missing so much of what it might be possible to do with flash, to introduce more of the "ooooooh" factor (if that is even a factor...)

Might I suggest, as further enhancements:-


full screen meaning full screen. Why not bitmap smooth the incoming hi rez images, and then shift their scale so that the image completely fills the users screen, proportionally corrected to give a really nice crisp clean fullscreen image, to fit in its fullscreen holder.
Transitions. Transitions. Transitions. Get a copy of the caurina/tweener classes and slap on some snappy effects in between the images.
The "press escape" thing is pretty annoying, but there's no way around it i guess. unfortunate, but hard wired into the player sadly.
I think part of the point of lightbox though, is that the images are also able to degrade gracefully should the user have any accessibility issues, such as mobile device usage, or screen readers, or maybe even just javascript disabled.

This solution wouldn't seem to provide any of this graceful degradation.


Sorry for the harsh crit, but hopefully the retort will blow me away! Still a nice idea though. Good Luck!

[.ral:cr]

no problem for critics. but to answer them and excuse myself i've done something too simple :P :
- the escape full screen is indeed annoying, but the same dead time you'll get with the majority of the lightboxes that are full of animations. really hate them, my philosphy is that when you click a photo you'll want to see it really fast. the same when you're in fullscreen and you want to jump to the next photo. but anyway, i'm planning to do a fast fade effect. of course, i can use caurina, or my entire engine of the imagin gallery, but will not be light anymore.
- i can't enlarge the photo, they'll became unsharp and i don't want this. i'm scaling them down when needed.
- without js will not work neither a classic lightbox.

[biznuge]

have a look at bitmap smoothing for the incoming images, which will reduce dramatically the pixelation. I understand your points about the escape theing and the transitions (although a quick fade would still be better than nothing) but the image not being fullscreen when the app is is a major stumbling block in terms of coolness, in my opinion.

Bitmap smoothing in as3 is great. as long as you're not trying to enlarge the image too much.

give it a boosh!

[.ral:cr]

makes sense for less pretentious photos, i'll think if i'll add an option to disable it, or the user to disable it, or no option at all, just fullscreen. i'm already using smoothing, you can see it if you expand in place the photos.

i have 2 things on the list now:
- to communicate with other lightboxes running in the same page
- i'll try to join with a js lightbox developer so we can open each other photos, i'll open the photos in fullpage with js from flash thumbs, and he'll open photos in fullscreen from js thumbs. this should solve the problem with phones or old computers that have no fp9.

if you have some other ideas just shoot.

[biznuge]

yeah. this might be nice as some kind of extension to lightbox acatually.

[simplistik]

it must be because i'm an "old school" web guy ... but ummm ... lightbox was made to emulate flash sites that were already doing it. so saying that this is the first lightbox in flash is completely incorrect. it is however nice, the two options to expand and load in place is cool, gives people other options than just that full screen escape thing ... which is btw, pretty annoying.

[.ral:cr]

i didn't read the history of the lightbox, if any, but something like this in flash is simply a gallery for flash, mine is for html. in html the need was to not leave the current page or open popups.