Auto-hide Playbar!

Intro

Today I worked out a solution for a user question on the forum:

 'Is there a way to auto-hide the playbar in the published files? I would like the playbar to appear only when the mouse is over the area where the playbar should be, something similar to 'auto-hide the taskbar' on the desktop"

Nice challenge, perhaps you'll find this also worthwhile? No complicated advanced actions here.

Example

Play this movie, it only has 2 slides, the playbar is at the bottom, when you hover your mouse over that region the playbar will show up and you can click the next button... Playbar hides when you move the mouse away from the bottom.

Work flow

Glad that I can refer once more to a Captivate friend, Chris Dorna (Dutch-speaking like me but we do not live in the same country). Grab a copy of Chris Dorna's widget to hide the close button on the slidelet, it is free, here is the link:

HideSlideletClosebox

 

Ready? Here are the steps:
  • Configure the playbar in overlay mode (will show on the slide, to make the rollover effect realistic) using the Skin editor.
  • Turn off the borders in the same skin editor, by default there is a bottom border for the playbar when not in overlay mode.
  • On the first slide, on Enter Slide replace the default action  (Continue) by  Assign cpCmndShowPlaybar with 0 to hide the playbar at the start
  • Configure one of the Rollover Slidelet styles using the Object Style Manager so that no border, nor runtime borders are shown (see image in the Gallery)
  • For each slide you'll need to
    • insert two rollover slidelets with the style you just edited
    • resize the first rollover slidelet (not the slidelet itself) to approximate the size of the playbar (see image in the Gallery); as action On Rollover attach  Assign cpCmndShowPlaybar with 1; when the user hovers over the playbar will become visible
    • move the second rollover slidelet as action On Rollover attach  Assign cpCmndShowPlaybar with 0; when the user moves away from the playbar he rolls over this second slidelet and the playbar will be hidden
    • insert Chris' widget and configure it to hide the close button for both slidelets - instructions are in the widget itself.

You have to repeat the last actions for all the slides,  use copy/paste but do not forget to edit the HideSlideletClosebox Widget properties to adapt to the new ID of the slidelets. In the last image of the Gallery you see those properties for the second slide, where I kept the default labels for the Slidelets: Slidelet_3 and Slidelet_4.