Back when I switched to using a flash for the top image, one request was that I allow people to store the image they were looking at. I can't do that directly out of the flash file because the flash security sandbox doesn't permit it. You either can manipulate local files, or you can manipulate files on the web, but you can't do both.

I never understood why anyone wanted this. But apparently some people did. And it just now occurred to me that I can give you something nearly as good, and I just implemented it. In the upper right corner now is another magic invisible button. If you click it, a new browser window or tab (depending on how your browser is set to treat target "_blank") opens with the current image in it, and from there you can drag-and-drop or right-click to your heart's content.

The lower right corner is a magic button which causes the flash file to choose a new image to display, on every click (for IE) or every other click (for Firefox). I still don't know why that doesn't work correctly for Firefox (and certain other browsers) and I still don't have the slightest idea how to fix it. I still believe it's a bug in Flash, and it won't change until Adobe does something about it. I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.

The lower left corner is a button that causes your browser to load the main page. The upper left corner acts like the lower right corner except that a mouse hover brings up a panel displaying a bunch of internal information about the flash.

UPDATE: If you're looking at an animation, the upper right button will open that in a new window/tab, too. But the animations are flash files themselves, so you can't drag-and-drop or right-click them to save them. Sorry; nothing I can do about that.

If you really need your own local copy, for some reason, then in Firefox you can open a new tab to "about:cache" and then dig it out of the file cache. There's no equivalent in IE; Microsoft thinks we're too stupid to be allowed into the cache and does its best to prevent us from getting into it.

UPDATE: And having written the above, I just now realized what I was doing wrong that was screwing up Firefox (and Chrome etc.) and fixed it. (Yes, it was my fault.) The lower right button should work every time now. At least it does in Firefox for me.

So the current version of Chooser is 37.

UPDATE: By the way, it's better now than before. Used to be, the top image was always named "top.jpg". But now it will have a unique name, so you don't have to rename it.

Of course, sometimes the name is something like "GuP.zip:0101.jpg" so you better hope that having a colon in the name doesn't screw up the operating system of your choice. (Windows doesn't mind, but I have no idea how MacOS handles that.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 02:35 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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