Badmouthing Lightbox Gone Wild or: A good Lightbox that Supports Flash (is hard to find)

an example of the comment layout at particletree.com

Or at least it was for me.

It all started out rather nicely — A client of mine needed a flash movie created that would load some images and flvs via xml, a virtual tour of a golf course. And they wanted it set into the jquery lightbox their previous developer had set up. This particular lightbox was the jQuery lightbox plugin by Leandro Vieira Pinho, a smooth, well functioning lightbox for image content. Unfortunately, I found out once I’d created the flash environment that it doesn’t support content other than images.

I had never worked with lightboxes before, so I had a little research to do before I figured out that many lightboxes on the web only support images. This is an important thing to consider before you select the one for you. Anyway, I was looking around, and a number of sites suggested the tool ‘Lightbox Gone Wild’, by Chris Campbell and Particle Tree.

It was referred to as a great, simple lightbox tool that supported non-image content. I went to their site and found that you could load a swf, embedded in an html page, into their lightbox, and also create an html form, which would lead one to believe it was simple enough to submit the data from the form fields. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a slightly misrepresented feature.

Now, one of the reasons i went with lightbox was that I liked their style — their site is cool and has a nice color scheme, they had some silly pictures of a dude showing his nipples in their demo stuff, I was eager to use a product by these people. Then I started looking in the comment log.

The first thing you notice in LIghtbox Gone Wild’s comments section is that they stack, in an attempt to be a little outside-the-box, I assume, in a two column clump, with random different colors in each comments div background, and a neat little shape surrounding it. It looks neat, but it’s not very easy to navigate. Couple that with the fact that the comments reveal the only in-depth information on use and implementation in the site, and you can start to imagine what it’s like to sift through 3 years of q&a (sometimes a) for a posting that even possibly matches your own issue. plus every other one is people saying people need a hug, which starts to grate after a while. Call me a curmudgeon.

Anyway, I don’t mean to turn this entry into a pure shit-talk session against Lightbox Gone Wild, but I feel a little is necessary to get people up to speed on the frustration they may encounter should they choose to go that route. It seems to be a nice simple starting point for people who already have chops in Ajax and jQuery, and want to custom-build their own setup. But for someone like me, who learns as he goes and relies on the transparency and availability of the authors of proprietary tools like this, it is a frustrating product.

this is where Lightbox Gone Wild's demo form takes you when you push submit. And they still say on the site that you can use forms with LGW...

Basically, once you look into their demo file you see that their form example just loads an image on clicking the submit button. Even though they advertise on the site that you can use it to put forms in a lightbox. The most recurrently asked questions in the 3 years of comments are about submitting $_POST data from a form, and the only answers seem to come from other users who maybe haven’t tried out their own solutions in every case. At least that’s what it began to feel like to me.

At least now I understand why they have closed comments on the tool for a year or more, and why there is no contact info available for the authors on the site. There is one other thread on the particle tree site about a new update that will improve form submission and a lot of other stuff, but that is three years old, and the last comments are to the extent of, “So is this like not happening anymore?”, so I am assuming they have abandoned it.

I was also having some problems in Internet Explorer 8 using the rel=insert style of loading from within an existing lightbox. the flash wasn’t displaying. Could have been some stupid mistake on my part, but I was so frustrated with Particle Tree at this point that I just decided to find another tool.

In the end, I have gone with Shadowbox, and paid the $20 unlimited-use license he requests for commercial developers. The site has a little more documentation, examples in different types of media, and a forum. AND it will load .swf files without an html page underneath. I considered Thickbox as well, but there was a sort of disclaimer on the site regarding flash:

Question – Can I display Flash in a ThickBox?
Answer – In short, yes! However, I have not personally tested this yet. I have no idea of the browser quirks and support surrounding the usage of Flash in a ThickBox.

…after my frustration with the lack of answers at Lightbox Gone Wild, I couldn’t in good conscience go with Thickbox after seeing that. That said, there is a lot of talk about thickbox on the web, too, as a good flash solution for lightboxes. I’d be interested to know what others think, especially Thickbox vs. Shadowbox.

I just wish the maintainers of Lightbox Gone Wild’s site would be more honest about its limitations in the content they present. If it can’t do the things you say it can do, don’t say it can do them. Take the stupid nipple picture form out of your demo, quit boasting that your product will do it, and just tell people honestly what its limitations are. Then you won’t have so many unanswerable questions on your comment thread that you end up closing it out of frustration.

How a Hole in the Heart Became a Chip on the Shoulder

the end of this sign says "When we smell the burning flesh from the ovens it will be too late" ...

I’m a little distraught about the seemingly iron-clad appeal of political players such as Sara Palin — or her media colleagues for that matter — who seem to do little with their influence but promulgate this L.C.D. standard of political merit that seems to have overridden the historical foundations of our democracy.

I did a lot of protesting in the years following 9-11. I got into a number of community organizations in Olympia, WA — where I was attending school at the Evergreen State College — and participated in some direct actions against the Iraq War, as well as travelled around WA a couple months gathering signatures for an ultimately ill-fated piece of grass-roots legislature intended to call into question the constitutionality of the Iraq War. I could go into greater detail, and if you do a google search of my name you’ll find a number of entertaining entries chronicling some of my activist antics through my college years, but I want to make a point beyond tooting my own horn.

I would say one of the defining aspects of my experience in the first decade of this century was the rift that seemed to open up everywhere I (or any of us) encountered ideological contrast with others relative to our country’s foreign and domestic policy.

On one side, there was the radical and moderate left shouting “NO BLOOD FOR OIL!”, etc, and questioning the validity and integrity of our executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the reliability of our extensive networks of intelligence.

On the moderate and extreme right, the only cries for the most part were “Support Our Troops” and “Support the President” or slogans to that effect.

It became clear that the sheer audacity of  the left in questioning the President and the War was offensive to the right side.  In 2003 and 2004 things got intense. A couple people drove by the peace camp in Olympia waving guns threateningly at us. An angry Vietnam vet came and pushed around old ladies at one demonstration. A bunch of men in their 50s threatened to kick my ass if I didn’t take my petition and get the hell out of Leavenworth, WA.

I know, everybody had some experiences along these lines. But there was a consistent difference in the motives of the left or right throughout he whole ordeal —whereas the logic of the left side was intent on transparency and discussion of the issues in question, the right’s only intent seemed to be to angrily tell us to shut the fuck up and quit being pussies. Even as all signs began to point more and more to a sweeping win for the left in the argument.

So fast forward to now.

We’re still in Afghanistan and Iraq, and nobody’s happy about it. We’ve learned that the CIA intelligence that Hussein had WMD’s was a fabrication. We’ve spent ten years in Afghanistan without any promise of finding Osama Bin Laden, who is likely recreating quietly in Pakistan. Evidence reveals that our attempt at vengeance on the Arab world for the terrorist attacks on 9-11 has not only failed to hit the intended mark (Bin Laden) but it has also contributed to a MORE threatening, MORE centralized network of Extremist-Islamic terrorist organizations, and perhaps opened channels between such networks and Arab nations disenfranchised from the UN and US — perhaps facilitating a greater and more efficient economic infrastructure for these groups in their future attempts.

We know that, in retrospect, there is no logical basis for our presence in either Iraq or Afghanistan. For the most part, the left has given up. The idea of leaving the wars has been rendered in the media as unrealistic, given the point to which we’ve followed through so far. Few seem to even argue the point anymore, save for a few unpopular senators (bless them) and maybe Code Pink and Women in Black. I know this overlooks a lot, and that it is a negative exxaggeration. I apologize for this , but I am trying to make a point.

That point is that it’s safe now for people on the right to come out and admit that they were wrong, and that the left was right. It is a perfectly good time, now as much as any other time, to insist on the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. But hardly anyone will. We are sold a lot of quotes about strategy, and responsibility, but I argue that the main reason we are not considering withdrawal on a more universal basis in the USA is pride.

I think everyone that pished and booed and hissed the war protestors became jealous of them for having been correct in their assertions the entire time. I think the jealousy has eaten a hole in the right wing — a shame, a secret knowledge that they were wrong, and that thousands of young men and women from the US (not to mention the countless Iraquis) have died as a result of their stubborn support for an illegal and immoral military campaign.

And instead of recognizing the hole in their hearts, these normal people across the country now carry a chip on their shoulder and, I would venture to suggest, an envy of the self-righteous left for having been vindicated by the judge of history. So, instead of turning a new leaf — looking at the world from the standpoint of that weathered wisdom and instinct of one who has been confronted their own folly — one who has summoned the strength from within to recognize when their thinking went wrong, when they most grievously ERRED in judgment –– Instead of allowing the experience to transform them, they are instead grasping out at a new opportunity to give the do-gooders on the left a middle finger.

The stuff you hear these Tea-Partiers say… It’s scary. I mean, there are many among them who have lives and families, and in many practical ways are much more together and productive than myself — But something in their life experience has informed them that truth is established by the winner of a shouting match instead of by discussion, investigation, research or debate.

They want to put Sarah Palin up on a pedestal for championing intellectual mediocrity. They want to live in a world where men like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are somehow credible academic and political authorities. They want to carry signs around at their protests slandering the commander-in-chief, when during Bush’s presidency that was verboten.

Nobody will just come out and say that they are mad that there’s a black man in the White House, but I can’t help but take that from the baseless, inconsistent spew of slander that seems to emanate form this faction of our population. The idea that a socialized healthcare system is going to turn us into a new take on Stalin’s USSR is embarrassingly ridiculous. Socialism is an element of any tax-paying republic, since our country’s inception. I have a feeling that the healthcare bill was just a good excuse to come together, and now that they’ve found each other, I am afraid to see where the Tea Party goes from here — what new depth they are willing to sink to in their ignorant quest to have the last word on the left.