Bluefire Blog

In my previous blog post about background images, I mentioned in passing that a swf file can be used as the background image (it is an "unsupported" feature though) . There are lots of nifty things you can do with that (if you know Flash) like having a video wallpaper background, but one of the more common uses might be to add background music to your gallery.

To do this you would need to import a sound file into an FLA, and set it up as a looping "event" sound. Then you just put a "play" action on frame 1, etc. and export the swf. Then drop the swf somewhere into your "bin" folder inside an exported gallery, and point to it in the style.xml file:

<backgroundBgImg alpha="00.00" src="bin/backgroundmusic.swf"/>

This is pretty easy to do, yes? If you are a power user of Flash, you could do some other really interesting things with this. For example, you could fix the size of the gallery, turn off the menu bar, remove any titles that would normally appear in the header, turn the header opacity to "0" and then put whatever you want to show up in the header into your background swf; linked text in an embedded font, buttons, hit counter, video narration, news feed - whatever.

And while there are limits to how much you can change the "layout" of the content area of the gallery, you can use a combination of the "fixed" image canvas area settings, and the caption area size settings, etc to have a fair amount of control. For example, you could use the "leftSide" caption settings to force the image canvas and playback buttons to move over to the right, and then put a vertical "nav bar" in the left side within your backround swf.

If anyone does actually play with this, I'd love it if you added a comment to the referring blog post with a link to the example.