Integrating Flash Animations - Summary

In this article you've seen how to add simple linear animations and control their playback through the RoboDemo animation options. You've also seen how you can add more complex interactive animations and use ActionScript to control how they're played back.

These basic principles should allow you to add virtually any type of Flash content to your RoboDemo movies and even add your own custom functionality.

I'll leave you with two samples that demonstrate how you can apply these principals to produce customized functionality in your movies.

This first sample uses what I covered in the "Pausing the RoboDemo Movie While Playing the Animation" section to integrate a drag-and-drop animation into a movie:

This second sample uses what I covered in "Playing the RoboDemo Movie and Animation Concurrently" to add keyboard control to the play bar.

I hope you've found this article interesting and are now inspired to begin experimenting for yourself. I'd love to hear any feedback you may have, so feel free to use the feedback link on the left, or drop by the RoboDemo forums.

Above all, remember to have fun!

Inserting Animation Frames

In this first example you'll insert some Flash SWF files into a RoboDemo movie as animation frames to produce this example:

1. In RoboDemo, open Example1_rd.rd, which you downloaded as part of the sample files archive.

   You'll see that the movie consists of three slides labeled Slide 1, 4, and 5.

2. Click the second slide and select Insert > Animation Frame. Navigate to and open Example1_a_complete.swf.

   The inserted "Welcome to RoboDemo" animation becomes slide 2. By default, animations play through once, which in this case takes five seconds. If you needed the animation to play longer, for example, if it looped and you wanted to play it twice, you could change the duration by right-clicking the animation and selecting Properties > Timing.

3. Click the third slide and again select Insert > Animation Frame, then open Example1_b_complete.swf.

   The inserted animation becomes slide 3.

4. Click the final slide and select Insert > Animation Frame, then open Example1_c_complete.swf.

   The inserted animation becomes slide 5.

5. If you haven't already, display the Filmstrip by selecting View > Filmstrip.
6. In the Filmstrip, click and drag slide 5 down so it becomes slide 6.
7. Now you can save the file (File > Save) and preview it (File > Preview).

Congratulations, you've taken a standard RoboDemo movie and added 3 simple animation frames to inject a little pizzazz.

Now you'll have a look at adding animations onto the slides in our movies.

A powerful and often underutilized feature of RoboDemo is its ability to use Macromedia Flash animations within movies. By including Flash animations in your movies, you can build anything from eye-catching introductions to customized buttons, navigation, and controls, as well as adding sophisticated control through the Flash coding language, ActionScript. In short, animations provide almost endless possibilities.

Sample Files

• robodemo_anim.zip (704 KB)

Conclusion

RoboHelp and RoboDemo are both extremely powerful tools for developing online Help systems and Flash movies. However, the true power of each type of content is not fully realized until one augments such content with other technologies. In the case of RoboDemo movies and online Help, the combination is truly awesome—users looking up information in online Help topics can first read about the techniques they need, and then view a Flash-based demo depicting the very actions described in words.

While file size considerations would doubtless prevent illustrating every technique in a Help file with a RoboDemo movie, there are some tasks that simply must be seen in animation to be readily understood. For that reason, RoboHelp developers would be well-advised to obtain RoboDemo and use it to extend the power and ease-of-use of their Help files. The techniques described in this article are only a starting point on the subject of blending RoboDemo Flash movies and online Help systems. I hope other Help developers will find some inspiration here to experiment and find their own innovations. The reward will be Help files that are not only more useful, but also easier on the eye!

Playing the Movie from the TOC Page

While you cannot insert a call to a custom JavaScript function in the TOC page itself (because the HTML Help viewer, which is based on a specialized subset of the Internet Explorer browser, has no way of loading an external JavaScript file), you can accomplish the same result using one of two different methods:

• Link the TOC page to a topic that contains an onLoad event handler that calls your custom JavaScript function for opening a window and displaying the HTML file containing the SWF code. The window that is displayed when this topic is viewed shows an HTML file and SWF movie that are both compiled into the CHM file through their inclusion in the RoboHelp HTML Baggage Files folder. The JavaScript window.open() function is the same one used in the above section on playing the movie in a custom window. Here is an example of how such an "onLoad" event handler would look:

  <body onLoad="javascript:showSwf2('notepad.html')">  

• Link the TOC page to a line of JavaScript code that calls the native JavaScript method window.open(), which takes three parameters: the name of the HTML file to be shown in the new window, the name of the new window (optional), and attributes for the window (dimensions, position, scrollbar, status bar, toolbar, and so on). The following snippet provides an example of the type of code you can enter in the Link to text box of the TOC Page Properties dialog box (Figure 2) to open a new window and display a RoboDemo movie in its accompanying HTML page directly from a mouse click:

  javascript:window.open('notepad.html','', 'width=320, height=276')  

  

  Figure 2: The TOC Page Properties dialog box

The only strange thing about this way of directly linking a movie to a TOC page is that the topic pane displays a blank "topic" that consists only of the word "[object]". As a workaround, you can specify "left" and "top" values for the new window that will place it above the topic pane, which only works as long as the user does not drag the HTML Help window to a different spot on the desktop. While this is admittedly a bit unusual, I include this method here as a way of illustrating how inventive one can be with HTML Help.