a way to pre-load rollover images?

Poster: theking __at__ mysecretbase.com
Dated: Monday May 20 2002 - 17:23:15 BST

I have a client that I'm building a menu system for who complains that the rollovers are slow to come up. The main images are fine, but the rollovers take a beat or two to download, which increases to an unacceptable amount of time for international visitors (I'm in USA and he's in Australia).

The problem is magnified by the fact that images are 100% of the top-level display. No text until we hit levels 2+.

It sure would be nice to be able to pre-load images into an array, then refer to the array items instead of the images themselves.

Possible? I'm not a javascript guy, so while I know images can be pre-loaded to arrays, I'm unsure if I could piece one together that would work, although I have some examples.

Poster: Andy
Dated: Monday May 20 2002 - 17:44:19 BST

Matt,

This was adressed in the latest release. We have done away with the old system that was slow on bad connections and filled web server log files full of useless info.

The menu now pre-loads the images and re-uses it again if need be.

What version are you running

Cheers
Andy.

Poster: theking __at__ mysecretbase.com
Dated: Monday May 20 2002 - 17:58:04 BST

Hi Andy,

3.4.03. I just downloaded a new one and thats the current version available, unless there's another d/l area.

To do the mouseovers I used

http://www.milonic.com/menu/dyn_images_sample.php

as my guide. It has the same ''skip-a-beat'' display (I'm using IE6), although I have a 1.5mb connection. I emailed you directly late yesterday with a direct link to that project we've previously discussed. You got that?

ADDED NOTE AFTER POST: I just tried that example in NN 6.2 andOpera 6. It preloads perfectly... or at least it performs much, much faster. This may be an IE-specific issue?

Cheers,

Poster: Andy
Dated: Monday May 20 2002 - 18:05:48 BST

If it's what I think it is it's definately something that was fixed in about version 3.4.04.

IE was behaving a little odd with the images before then

Cheers
Andy.

Poster: theking __at__ mysecretbase.com
Dated: Monday May 20 2002 - 18:26:12 BST

I was mistaken about the currently available ver. looking at the wrong one on my box (DOH!).

However, after putting up 3.4.05 I don't see a difference in speed... well, actually I get a noticeable *decrease*.

The page I'm looking at is at

http://foohbar.org/menu/menumaker/menu3.cfm

When I load this page I now can see a moment's delay as the images are loaded... A delay long enough to let me see the default red bgcolor before the images load over it. Same story on my local dev server. Hooked into a box via terminal server and used IE 5 fromthere, and it looked much more responsive, despite the nature of the connection.

When I mouse over each image I can see a blip of network traffic as each image is accessed.

Am I using a bad/old array format, is this just me or an IE6 bug?

Poster: Andy
Dated: Monday May 20 2002 - 18:47:01 BST

Hmmmmm.

This is a tricky one. I've got your code running on my server here and I'm getting the images from your server.

The connection is not great and I too can see the red background while waiting for the images to load.

However, is it all that bad?

What would you prefer to see in it's place?

BTW - I did get your demo stuff this morning, thanks for that. I've had a quick look and once I get a spare few minutes I'll be able to take a proper look.

Cheers
Andy

Poster: theking __at__ mysecretbase.com
Dated: Monday May 20 2002 - 18:59:21 BST

No, the red is no big deal and not the problem. Just something I noticed when switching to 3.4.05.

The issue is the delay in getting the *mouseover* images. Each of those top-level items has a swapimage associated with it. On my own connection, I can see net access each time I roll over an image and the swapimage is served up. So between that, the delay in display and the great performance I get in the other browsers... it looks like there's a glitch in how IE6 handles pre-loading.... cuz from what I can see it ain't. ;D

The client, viewing the site from Australia, was *barely* able to see the mouseovers at all. Same problem magnified thru distance. Not sure from how you're testing it whether or not you're picking them up with any degree of speed.

Poster: Diakonos
Dated: Thursday May 23 2002 - 21:33:23 BST

Just my .02 here, but couldn't you add some quick code like Dreamweaver uses in the menu_arry.js file to "preload" the images when the JS loads/runs?

i.e. the MM_preloadImages() function from version 3+

Then, just specify the images in an array, and call the function to "request" each of the images and store them in the visitor's cache.

Normally, this function is called as an "onLoad" in the <BODY> tag of a Dreamweaver created page.

Poster: theking __at__ mysecretbase.com
Dated: Thursday May 23 2002 - 22:06:50 BST

From what I can see, this menu isn't the only thing that fails to preload in IE6... Now that I'm looking I see it happening elsewhere, including a project I'm working on with a designer for another client of mine.

He's using Adobe GoLive to do his js, and his work has the same problem. *Something* weird in IE6 seems to be preventing *some* preloading code from working... silently and without error messages.

I've got a menu on my mysecretbase.com site that still preloads in IE6. Some neatly simple code I grabbed somewhere about a zillion years ago. Can't tell you why it works. Not being a js guy I can only observe the situation, rather than contribute anything useful. Frustrating.