[xenomorph_girl]

I started working on this online flash portfolio a few months ago, but ran into problems. Now, I've returned to it, and worked out some of the problems. but still am having other issues and questions.

I am trying to have my own little custom window come up. It works as follows.. you click the "Artwork" button on the navigation bar. Then, little thumbnails run out from the left and settle on the middle of the page. Then, when you click the thumbnails (so far, I've only done the right most thumbnail for the artwork thumbs), it brings up my custom window which is a piece of paper that is animated to uncrumple. Then, the full sized image is at the center of this custom window. The custom window has a closer "x" in the top right corner. When you close it, the paper custom window disappears (it unloads itself, unloads the main start page text for good measure, and then loads the artwork animation), and it returns to the thumbnails. In the first frame of the thumbnails Artwork animation, there is a snippet of code to unload the main start page text as well. So I don't know, having that code in both the custom window close button and the first frame of the thumbnail animation might be overkill. Here's the current issues I'm having...

First, the only way I've figured out how to get the custom window thing to work, is to make an external swf for each full sized image- so, one swf for every thumbnail- that's a lot. So for every thumbnail clicked, there is an swf with that full image and the paper animation. If anyone can figure out a better way to to this.. that would be awesome and much better than having a million swf's. My second problem is with closing the custom window. When you close it, it does return to the thumbnails, only they animate all over again (coming out from the left). I want the window to close and the thumbnails to already be in place. I was trying to figure out if there is some way to go to the end frame of the thumbnail animation after closing the custom window so that when it is reloaded it doesn't have to go through the whole animation again.

Another issue I just realized, too, is that the custom window only appears to be working in Internet Explorer. It doesn't even show up in Firefox (it used to before, when all it did was pop up with no picture and no close button and no unloading of the main text, but after those changes, it seems to only be working in Explorer now). If you need to ask more questions feel free. I'm still pretty new to Flash, so I'm sorry if anything I've done seems stupid or silly.

To see how it looks so far, you can go here- click "Artwork" and the right most thumbnail to see what I'm talking about:

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~wright21/index2