On a recent project we came across an issue where user initiated popups get blocked in Safari when being called by an AS3 Flash app. The issue doesn’t happen in AS2 and I’d not come across it before, but when I did and I researched it I found it was a well documented issue with no solution. Most popup blockers are able to distinguish between a user initiated popup and an automatic one, and this is the case with all browsers with AS2 or all browsers except Safari with AS3. But what do you do if a popup is an integral part of your design and you’re using AS3? As far as I can tell there is no fix for this issue, we found some apparent solutions but when when tested them they failed.
What I came up with isn’t a fix so much as a working solution. When you initiate a popup in Flash it’s done by calling a JavaScript function called window.open(). This function returns a boolean of True upon success or False upon failure. So programmatically this gives us a way of knowing if the popup has been blocked. In which case we offer the user up an HTML link to the popup that we know won’t get blocked. I believe that when designed well and with thought this can be an elegant solution for a small base of users who are probably already used to seeing certain functionality across the web fail for them.
There’s obviously a number of way to implement this, but as a quick and dirty example lets create a hidden HTML block to appear if the popup fails:
Okay now lets look at the popup JavaScript function that Flash calls:
function shareFacebook(){
success=window.open('http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://richie-p.com/blog','FacebookShare','toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,location=no,menubar=no,height=436');
if (!success){
document.getElementById("popupMessage").style.display="block";
}
}
So basically what’s going to happen is that the hidden window appears only if the popup failed, thus allowing for the user to click the HTML which doesn’t get blocked.
But what if we have multiple popup windows? We need a way to have one message div that can trigger an endless number of popups. And why does the message have to remain forever visible once it appears?
Bearing this in mind here’s an example of a more elegant generic version. Again it’s quick an dirty code and I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be in a production environment in its current state:
This time we have the popupMessage call a generic function:
The actual popup JavaScript function that Flash calls is the same, but this time we need it to set global variables:
var popupFunc="";
var popupTimer="";
function shareFacebook(){
p=window.open('http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://richie-p.com/blog','FacebookShare','toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,location=no,menubar=no,height=436');
if (!p){
popupFunc="facebookShare";
clearTimeout(popupTimer);
$("#popupMessage").slideDown("slow");
popupTimer=window.setTimeout('$("#popupMessage").slideUp("slow")',10000);
}
}
So what basically happens is if the popup fails we set the name of the popup function that failed into a global variable called popupFunc. We use the jQuery slideDown() method to gracefully make the message appear. We also use a global variable called popupTimer to hide the message after 10 seconds. And in case the message is already showing from a different request we clear the popupTimer so it doesn’t disappear too quickly.
And finally lets look at the generic popup function:
function launchPopup(){
$("#popupMessage").slideUp("slow");
eval(popupFunc+"()");
}
We hide the message and call the popup function.
Like I say this is all quick and dirty for display purposes. But I really believe this to be a solid and elegant solution to a frustrating and problematic situation.
We’ve got this project going on where users can create their own artwork which is saved to the server as an image, and we want them to be able to post it into Facebook. At first I thought it was going to take some effort and have to use the Facebook Connect API. But I was hoping for something easier, kind of how easy it is on Twitter to just tag a status GET string onto the URL. Then I remembered Facebook 
Test it out by clicking here
I’m loving what Marvel has been doing lately with their movies. Yes the Spider-man movies have been okay-ish, and sure they screwed up Daredevil something chronic, the Ghost Rider and Punisher movies were terrible (for me as comics they aren’t so hot either), the first Fantastic Four was alright whilst the second sucked, but the X-Men series has been pretty good, and whilst I hated the graphic novel I found the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie to be pretty great in it’s own way. And though the Ang Lee version of Hulk was a confusing mess we’d rather forget ever existed, Marvel more than made up for it with the Louis Leterrier sequel The Incredible Hulk which was out last year. He really understood that the Hulk is a lame character that only ever turns interesting when the story is about his Dr Bruce Banner alter ego, even the TV series from the seventies got that, it was only ever really for a few minutes a show that the Lou Ferrigno incarnation of Hulk graced the screen with his presence. And even more than with The Incredible Hulk movie, Marvel really hit a home run with the Iron Man movie that came out earlier that same summer. It was the perfect comic to screen adaptation – the perfect story, the perfect cast, the perfect sprinkle of mega stars, and CG animations had advanced to the point where this whole thing was fantastic and yet completely believable. They’d finally cracked it, and just in time, cos things we’re just getting interesting…
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