My earlier simple mega menu implementation post displayed some simple css and jquery to explode a standard navigation menu into a mega-menu… I’ve made it even better. My biggest issue with that implementation was that it did not keep the order like you’d expect. It read left to right in columns rather than down each column. In the example you can see the first column of three would read from the top: a, d, g, j… this could potentially be confusing. So I wanted to update it to keep the order better and just stack the columns of elements rather than the elements themselves.

I used some different jquery to execute this. First we walk through the menu elements and calculate which column they should be in. We basically map that element’s (li)index to the column it should be, some big math. Luckily I had some experience from actionscript in my arsenal doing just that, so porting the function to javascript I was ready to go. If your number X falls between A and B, and you would like to convert it to Y which falls between C and D follow this formula: Y = (X-A)/(B-A) * (D-C) + C. Plugging this function in and cancelling out the zeros and adding some rounding to get integers I got: Math.floor((liindex / $total * $cols)+1). Using this I added a class to each ‘li’ designating which column it should be in, and then used wrapAll to wrap them into column divs. Very simple and a much better implementation overall anyways. Better code, better user experience… what more can you ask… so here’s the example and jquery code. I’m thinking I should make this into a jquery plugin or something, any thoughts?

See the mega menu in action

Javascript code

css

Download

Visit this demo page and view source or save as…

I’ve been skinning quite a few ecommerce sites with the magento platform and wanted a simple way to explode the navigation menus. Some sites end up getting a long list of categories and sub-categories, so I wanted to do a mega-menu style navigation. One way to do it was to rewrite the html code for the navigation and pop each column into another nested unordered list. I’m not a fan of doing this because one – I didn’t want to manipulate the html. I like the simplicity of ul navigation with a clear flat list of li elements. Of course for nested sub-navigation any li can contain another ul. I wanted to just use some css and maybe javascript to visually accomplish the same thing. I also wanted it to be portable, so I could take it and use it on a wordpress install or even a plain html site. I went to my favorite: jquery. I knew there was a likely plugin out there already that would do something similar, but nothing after my initial search, but I realized that it was a simple procedure and mostly accomplished with some css.

I’ll walk you through the process here and let you inspect the code yourself and see it in action on the demo page. Assign each ul to be a default width of 15em, then each li element we float:left and also give it a width of 15em. This way we can change the ul width to 30em and automatically I have 2 columns! Assigning the nested ul a specific width according to it’s class is done through css, mm-0 will be 15em and incrementally each next one will be 15em more. mm-1 is 30 and mm-2 is 45. Then we use jquery to determine the number of elements in the list and assign it a class accordingly. This involves some math and some preferences. Using the magic ui number 7, I determined that a menu with more than 7 elements should explode into multiple columns. So anything less than or equal to 7 I assign the class ‘mm-1′ which in the css sets the width to the standard 15em (ie 1 mega menu column). More than 7 should pop into columns no more than 8 tall. So dividing the total by 8 will give us the number of columns we want. We’ll add a class of mm-x, where x would be the number of columns. And the li elements will float to the left and fill in the space in columns.
One specific issue is the last element in the menu, sometimes we need to style that element differently. I’ll loop through each child of the nested ul element and if it is on the bottom row apply a class of ‘last’. But this was a little tricky in calculating which would be last because were never sure how many elements there will be or how many columns. I just used the remainder after dividing the total by the number of columns, then if the remainder could be used to know which elements are on the bottom row.

OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at the code.

HTML

This I won’t show, you can inspect the source of the demo if you wish to see it, it a basic nested collection of unordered lists. It’s the standard that is created by magento, wordpress and most other CMS platforms.

CSS

Javascript

Don’t forget to include jQuery (I prefer using the google hosted version at http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js)

See the demo in action

Flashvars and actionscript 3! Flashvar is a way that in your html embed codes (object tags) you can send variables and values into your swf file. These variables can then be grabbed internally and used your programming! Examples of these could be images that you want to use in your swf but don’t want to import or hardcode them into the flash file or paths to xml or flv files to use as well. Actionscript 3 has a different procedure than as2 did as to how you read these flashvars from the actionscript side. The embed codes and html side of things are still the same, but in case your new to actionscript altogether, I’ll give an example of the html as well.

In actionscript 3 we use the loaderInfo object to access the flashvars. The parameters Object of the loaderInfo will contain all the flashvar variables and values.

As an example of something that is visual I’ve created this little app to read some options from flashvars about colors. An app that will read a list of colors and update a box that is on the stage already to those colors with the specified delay. I always have fun with randomness so I threw in the option for random colors as well. This file looks for certain flashvars: color, loop, delay and random. These are the keys or names of the variables and they are followed by the values you want them to hold. Note that flashvars can be set in any order, so you don’t have to start with color and end with random.

In this example I’m looking for 4 flashvars specifically (in any order):

• colors:String – a comma delimited list of hex colors or simply a string “random” for randomly generated colors (the hex for black #000000 needs to be 0×000000 in flash) (default is random)
• loop:Boolean – whether or not to repeat these colors (default is true)
• delay:Number – the delay between colors (in seconds). (default is 1 second)
• random:Boolean – determines whether to cycle through colors in given order or randomize. selecting random overrides the loop to true. (default is false)

This is much more than is required for this example, but I was having fun playing with random colors and timing and options. I figured it diesn’t hurt to show the effect you can have with a couple different variables on one file. Here is an example using the object tags above:

And here are some more (please don’t have a seizure!)

Here’s the full source if you’re interested:

I’ve written a tutorial which is published over at flash.tutsplus. This tutorial demonstrates how to create a horizontally scrolling image viewer and covers xml parsing, loading and resizing external images, and creating intuitive and responsive scrolling!

So check out the Tutorial to Create a Responsive Image Scroller in ActionScript 3.0 over at flash.tutsplus.com!

You’ll find full source code available for download as well as the demo files and step by step milestones all throughout the tutorial.

Here is a preview of a file I’m writing a tutorial for. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it deals with many normal tasks and will show my process a bit. This tutorial will show how to create a horizontally scrolling image viewer. It will cover xml loading & parsing, loading & resizing external images to fit into a scrollable container, and creating intuitive and responsive scrolling!

Let me know what you think, and if there’s anything you want specifically mentioned/explained in it I’ll do my best! Or if you have any ideas of how this could be improved.

Update: The article/tutorial has now been published follow the link to theTutorial to Create a Responsive Image Scroller in ActionScript 3.0