ThumbGrid 2 expands the component's already flexible, customizable interface and makes it even better with a slew of new features.
ThumbGrid 2 publishes a new gallery screen for album previews; allowing users to browse all available content in a gallery. The gallery screen can be automatically displayed at startup, as well as accessed on-demand through an external button. Click an album on the gallery screen, and ThumbGrid displays all the content that album contains. Or, you can stay at the gallery screen and load the album in the SlideShowPro player (effectively using the gallery screen as an album navigator). The gallery screen's thumbnails can be sized and ordered differently from content, as well as display album titles, to visually set them apart.
In the first version of ThumbGrid, the thumbnails currently in view always matched the album currently loaded in the SlideShowPro player. With ThumbGrid 2, you can independently browse and load thumbnails from different albums in a gallery without changing your main slideshow.
The first version of ThumbGrid offered one way to size thumbnails — adjusting the width/height of the component, and/or adjusting the number of interior rows/columns. With ThumbGrid 2, you can now specify the exact pixel width/height you want each thumbnail image to be. ThumbGrid 2 automatically spaces the fixed thumbnails to align evenly (horizontally and vertically), or you can turn off auto-spacing and allow the thumbnails to flow naturally as one group.
ThumbGrid 2 gives you to the option of displaying content and album titles inside each thumbnail element. Titles can be rendered on top of images as a layer, or as an inline element that crops the image. There is a full array of styling options for the title text, including size, color, padding, alignment, typeface, position, drop shadows, and more.
ThumbGrid 2 extends the first component's "Fade in" effect (applied when loading images) with additional animation options, including "Slide", "Mask", "Zoom Out" and "Diagonal". More load effects will be added during the ThumbGrid 2 lifecycle.
Now there's a third way to browse the grid -- UIScrollbar. The UIScrollbar component is an Adobe component built-into every copy of Flash, and can be used to horizontally or vertically scroll the grid. Usage is simple -- drag it to the stage, give the scroll bar an instance name, and assign that name to ThumbGrid. ThumbGrid will detect the scroll bar and initialize it for use with the component.
ThumbGrid 2 inform users which thumbnails are associated with videos by (optionally) displaying a video play button on top of thumbnails. You can change the video button's background color, highlight color, and scale. And if you don't want it, you can simply turn it off.
ThumbGrid 2 includes new public methods for you to use with buttons or custom navigation elements. These include displayAlbum(), displayCurrentAlbum() and displayGallery(). We've also added a screen event that broadcasts which screen is currently in view (gallery or album).