Simple Pop-Ups – no HTML!

I’ve been with Mag+ since it was a twinkle in our R&D director’s eye, so I love it when teaches me something brand new about the platform. Here’s an ingenius little trick I just picked up from the brilliant designers at one of our newest clients, CGI Interactive. There’s a little-used function in our system called Control Images: It’s a way to create your own pause or play buttons for movies and audio that appear and disappear as the media is playing. See this page for more on adding these.

What the folks at CGI realized is that this same functionality could be used to create simple pop-ups of the type normally done with HTML: tap a button, have a caption appear. The trick is twofold: First, make what would normally be the “play” button transparent, so even though it’s onscreen, the user doesn’t see it. When the hotspot (placed over the button you want users to tap) is tapped, the system will load what would normally be the “pause” button—in this case, whatever caption image you want to appear. Because that “pause” image will disappear when the audio file is done, the second part of the trick is to link it all to a silent audio file that’s pretty long. Fortunately silent files don’t take up much room. You could place as many of these types of pop-ups on a page as you want, and position them anywhere. Brilliant.

We’ll pop up a movie of this in action in Showcase soon!