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Now that's a sexy Flex application

Wed, 2007-04-25 08:10 — mikepotter
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Spike TV has launched a new Flex based website that is well targetted to their primarily male audience. The site has an overview of all the shows on Spike TV, a section devoted to pictutes of scantily clad women, and another blog like section that they call "Rant".

From a geek perspective, there's a few interesting items in this application. First of all, the URL bar changes along with the application, another example of how people have solved the deep linking problem in Flash applications. (Check out the links to sections in the first paragraph of this blog entry). Users can send a link to a certain section of the site by copying and pasting the current URL from their browser, just like a regular HTML webpage.

Secondly, the site integrates video from Flash Media Server directly into the application, providing a nice, seemless experience for the end user. No extra plugins being launched or anything, just the one Flash application that loads images and text along with video.

Finally, the site also integrates advertisements at the top and on the right hand side of some pages. If anyone from the site design team is reading this, I'd like some more information on how you did this. Monetizing the work from Flex applications is something that a number of developers would be interested in, I'm sure.

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Wed, 2007-04-25 09:25 — senocular (not verified)

Denied!

http://www.spiketv.com/sitewide/ff_upgrade.html

Wed, 2007-04-25 12:06 — Kari (not verified)

Neat. However, there were

Neat. However, there were lots of stuff in their previous Flash site that I was hoping to be carried over. The new site is not that polished, but who knows that may get better down the road.

Peace,
Kari

Wed, 2007-04-25 14:27 — Anonymous (not verified)

Flash detection mess

I don't know if it's a sexy flex app, but they have badly messed with their flash detection script!!

I came with v9.0.28 and was asked to upgrade fo Flash 9. I clicked on the link to upgrade to the latest 9.0.45... and was still locked out, asked to upgrade to V9! What a mess they've done... Couldn't they have counted on the standard flex thing??

Wed, 2007-04-25 20:58 — Chris Bos (not verified)

Spike Response

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the small bump in traffic this afternoon!

We went live a few weeks back, and are working hard at fixing up the last remaining bugs and tweaks to get everything the way we want, so any feedback is more than welcome.

The Firefox 2.0 upgrade message is an unfortunate requirement, we wanted to enable the browser scrollbars (We are resizing the .swf dynamically when the flex app resizes itself) rather than the flex scrollbars, partially because the ads are sitting in IFrames positioned over top of the flex app, and the browser scrollbar was the only way we knew to scroll both browser and flex elements smoothly in unison.

Anyhow FF 1.5 has a bug where if the .swf is bigger than the browser's viewable area, then the hit areas don't scroll when the page does. (This only happens with wmode=opaque or wmode=transparent which is needed to site the iFrame above the flash movie... an annoying catch 22).

The Flash detection script is another out of the box element that seems just a little off. We did add a clause in the javascript to ignore the express install for IE users, (Corporate users who didn't have sufficient privilages don't see the express install prompt, they just get a big white screen.) Regardless, we have had some sporadic issues with other users also experiencing the issue above. (The site requires 9.0.28 or above).

The Ads are all served up by doubleclick, and are can be targeted to the deeplink elements of the site, allowing our sponsors to own a certain show or babe gallery. They are industry standard sizes, placed in iFrames above the Flex app. A good blog posting on how this is done and a decent comment thread with the certain gotchas can be found here http://www.deitte.com/archives/2006/08/finally_updated.htm

Cheers,
Chris

Wed, 2007-04-25 23:29 — Chris Rebstock (not verified)

Maybe its these guys

http://www.ff0000.com/ - Red interactive Agency

They do the UFC's ppv sites, its not mentioned anywhere on Red's site though, so its a long shot.

Thu, 2007-04-26 00:17 — pooya (not verified)

flex opensource

Scobleizer is reporting on Flex getting open source. Now that's sexy ;)

Thu, 2007-05-17 21:43 — rstroede (not verified)

From a user perspective... not good

As a frequent SpikeTV watcher and someone that visits their website on occassion looking for quick information such as schedules, episodes, etc., I find the Spike site terrible. The time to load the flash site has always been bad for just a quick lookup or something, and I'm on 5mb internet.

Then recently, I could not even get to the site at all. The IE title bar title kind of alluded to it trying to install Flash, and there was a "done" in the bottom left. No errors, no site, nothing. Chris Bos: you should be aware I have an extremely standard configuration, and others are probably experiencing the same as me, and thus you are chasing away web visitors.

I'm XP SP2, IE7, and current PC-cillin.

After reading this thread, I took a guess and went to the Flash site and updated to the most recent Flash and it fixed it.

But realize, most SpikeTV watchers probably aren't computer guru's. All the complexity, slowness, and need to upgrade Flash with no messsages or help are all way off base for your target audience.

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