can somone on dial-up tell me if my "skip" button on the intro works?

[benlowry]

Hi,

I've got an intro which is 144kbs (i know that's quite large but it's unavoidable).

In the preloader for the movie is a "skip" button that hopefully unloads the intro animation. On broadband i can't tell if it really does this.

Can someone on dial-up test this "skip" button for me? If it is working the menu (34kb) should load fairly quickly. Otherwise, it should load quite slowly because 144kbs of intro will be hogging the bandwidth.

Thanks guys.
Ben

[cosmiceye]

ehhh...did I missed something? Since when is a 144kb flash-intro large? If its unavoidable, I assume its worth it. And if a dial-up-user wish to wait no more ( but they are used to), they WILL use the "skip intro" button. Hey, its like a big .jpg! But streaming. Check how many bytes each frame has, maybe not even the dial-uppers needs to wait.

[Obi City]

Originally posted by cosmiceye
ehhh...did I missed something? Since when is a 144kb flash-intro large? If its unavoidable, I assume its worth it. And if a dial-up-user wish to wait no more ( but they are used to), they WILL use the "skip intro" button. Hey, its like a big .jpg! But streaming. Check how many bytes each frame has, maybe not even the dial-uppers needs to wait.

Good design technique should always include a skip intro button on your intro's for the impatient end user.

[benlowry]

also dial-up users must be catered for, and for a dial-up user a 144kb animation IS quite large....

[cosmiceye]

so I guess I did miss something...
Now tell me, if a 144kb animation IS quite large for a dial-up user, how much is reasonable to make a file (without intentions to preload it)?

[benlowry]

without a preloader....

a reasonable expectation is that most 56kbs dial-ups will achieve a streaming rate of about 3kbs. this is determined by their location relative to the site-host and the quality of their connection with their isp.

without preloaders, i would try to make an imageless animation, or one with very few images, aiming at no more than about 30-40kbs. because of flash's streaming, dial-up users will still see the animation, and any pausing between frames as they download the animation will be short delays.

Cheers,
Ben

ps....have any dial-up users checked that button for me yet??

[paulhurst]

If your using Flash MX there is a function built in to test the movie. when testing the movie inside flash on the view menu there is something about a bandwidth thing, i can't remember off the top of my head but if you look it up in the Flash Documentation (the html help pages) im sure you'll find more about it

Sorry i cant remember!

[cosmiceye]

thanks for the knowledge. Apologize for my stupid comments.

[benlowry]

true paulhurst,

the "bandwidth profiler" and "show streaming" options are a good test, but they both use a constant transfer rate.

in the interests of catering for as wide an audience as possible, it is important to test a little more thoroughly than just flash's bandwidth tests.

Cheers,
Ben

ps. no worries cosmiceye. in a perfect world everyone would have broadband anyway...but we are far from a perfect world. less than 50% of the usa is on broadband...in australia broadband is not available unless you live in a well populated area, and even then there are many cases where it is not available.

[paulhurst]

yeah thanks for pointing that out i didn't mean to sound like that. the best way is to test it for real else there would be no beta copies of software!