pacweb

Ok good news and bad news …

The Good News – Using the experimental build (from a few days ago); I have used the plugin to load in an almost full width animation into the header on the local dev version of my site. This animation is replacing my company logo. The site is running on WP 4.0, as well as the Genesis framework and a decently complex, responsive theme. The animation has a downlevel stage, as well as being set to responsively resize (width only). I used the php if statement, loaded in the functions.php (the theme has a function in there that controls the header image) then set a default animation through the plugin in the WP Admin. It all works perfectly, including the responsive resizing. I am now able to further refine the animation in Edge Animate, then just do a quick upload in the plugin to see the update.

The bad news – I have seen the same quirk that I saw this morning. When the page loads for the first time it is relatively blank and massive in size. I saw massive because there are very, very long horizontal and vertical scroll bars. If I reload the page (I think it goes away). If i resize the page, even just a small bit, the page loads up correctly. I think I have only seen this with animations that are set to use the Responsive Scaling setting in Edge Animate.

Timm – I will try to reproduce the problem and email you a screen shot.

~ PacWeb

Hi,

I have tested 7 animations that do not use a preloader, and all uploaded an worked correctly.

I tested 3 animations that do use a preloader and they also uploaded an worked correctly.

I tested 3 animation on a single page and all of them displayed correctly.

I also tested 1 animation that: has a preloader, does not use the Adobe CDN, and does not ” Publish preload DOM as a separate file.” This animation also uploaded and works correctly.

BUT, I did see some playback issues. I never saw my preloaders (wait cursor animations) and many of the animations did not display as they should have until my browser window was resized. I want to note that this may be more of an issue of browser refresh than a problem with the plugin. To do the testing, I would import an animation; in the WP admin update the shortcode, then in another tab reload that page to see the new animation.

I am going to do some more testing to see if the animation sizing issue that I ran into is related to the plugin. Namely I am going to setup individual animations in their own pages instead of reusing the same page. Along with this I need to check if selecting the settings for Responsive Scaling and Center Stage in Edge Animate might be related to the sizing issue I just encountered.

More to come …
~ PacWeb

Hi Philnicholl – thanks!

Hi Sam53 – is your friend still having problems?
Even after using the ES5 plugin and setting up the preloader.

Thanks,
~ PacWeb

I have a theory about why the “Publish preload DOM as separate file” setting is only under Web Publish settings and I just did a test that seems to confirm it.

Adobe got rid of the preloader.js as part of their lightening of Edge Animate. But it is still something that might be needed in customized web projects. So they kept a setting to publish that file under the Web Publish settings.

I am thinking that they were thinking that the setting was not needed under the Animation Deployment Package setting, because an OAM file is usually used by another Adobe product. So if the setting was under Animation Deployment it was unnecessary and potentially confusing to people using Animate.

In Dreamweaver I tried inserting an OAM file from an animation that does not have a preloader set (wait cursor) into a new HTML doc. A file that causes an import error in WP. It inserted (imported) perfectly.

I am thinking that Adobe built the ability to parse the OAM without a preloader (js file or wait cursor) into their programs. But didn’t realize that it threw off your plugin and only put a setting to create a preloader.js under Web Publish settings because that is the spot for ‘customized’ web output in Edge Animate.

Basically, they were trying to lighten the Edge Animate program and keep its UI straight forward. But ended up causing this subtle confusion.

Does this make sense?

If this is getting too convoluted, email me and we can setup a screen sharing call and I can take you through what I have done.

Thanks!

Can’t enable it.

But if I add a preloader (spinning wait cursor, etc) to my animation then I can check the box. I should note that this is under the Web Publish Settings. That option is not available under Animate Deployment Package.

I will email you a screen shot.

That exactly it. The preloader (animation setting) was not set and the published OAM file would not upload (import). The animation you downloaded from dropbox should be the first version that does not have a preloader set (animation setting). So it should replicate the upload error.

When I get a chance I will throw together another simple animation that does not have a preloader set (animation setting).

I wonder how many other people are running into the import error, because their animation does not have a preloader set (animation setting).

It has been tricky, when writing these posts, to distinguish between the preloader setting in Animate and the js file.