Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Facebook share pod causes flash to become invisible

Another problem with Facebook and Flash playing together. Using the fb:share-button: when the user clicks it the share pod appears in IE but it also makes the flash on the page disappear. This only happens in IE. I've tried setting the fb:swf wmode param to transparent but it doesn't help. Very frustrating...

update: I thought of a really cheap (but workable) hack. I've made a screenshot of the flash app and then covered it with a 80% black tint and made a .jpg. This is used as the background of the div that surrounds the flash movie. This way, when a user clicks on the share and the flash disappears the disabled grayed out image shows instead -- making it "look" like everything is fine. Of course the state is different (different text is showing for instance) but the user is focused on the share pod anyway.

I'm not thrilled with it but it will work for the time being until I can figure out how to have flash make calls directly to the server. Perhaps I should be skipping to Facebook Connect??

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