flash advertising on the desktop.

[TornUp]

first off, if people have read my previous posts, i don't properly work in a school yet, but i am intrested in how this is done and it might help out a few other people.

 

when i used to attend college, they had some sort of application running that cycled through flash animations and displayed them in a fixed player on the desktop of each workstation. it was used to notify students of up and comming student union activitys aswell as community adverts such as talk to frank and stuff like that...

 

iv looked around for software of how todo it. but as yet have found none. was wondering if any of you know of any software(free??) that does this and is easy to deploy over a network..

 

im aware with a bit of tweeking you could highly likly do this via some sort of active desktop setting, that displays a page on a intranet.. but id like to know if there is a application that can do it..

 

Tom.

[Edu-IT]

I would have thought that you could do this with Active Desktop. You could create a HTML page and store it centrally on a server and then set this page as the background on each of the desktops.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/171437

 

Edit: I should have read your post properly before replying!

Edited February 24, 2008 by Edu-IT

[dhicks]

when i used to attend college, they had some sort of application running that cycled through flash animations and displayed them in a fixed player on the desktop of each workstation.

 

Yuck. But if you wanted to do it, a "standalone Flash player" (search in Google) is what you're probably looking for. You can make one yourself if you have a copy of Visual Basic/C++/C# handy - simply drag a instance of the Flash OLE control onto a window, tell it where to load its file from (probably a network share location) and compile. Will VB let you create modal (no minimise/close buttons) windows? Might come in handy if you don't want the user to be able to close the window.

 

--

David Hicks

[TornUp]

hmm. if i created it in visual basic wouldn't the file it displays be hard coded in though? i want it cycle through. and also update when new flash files are added to a directory/list..

 

yeh you can get a visual basic window without no minimise / close buttons...

[dhicks]

if i created it in visual basic wouldn't the file it displays be hard coded in though?

 

I was thinking you'd get the Flash file to do the cycling through information part of things - Flash does animation, otherwise you might as well use JPEG files. You could get your VB application to list all .SWF files in a directory and display them one after the other, or maybe read filename/display time information from a text file.

 

--

David Hicks

[Joanne]

could it not have been a .gif file? My friends used to put those as their backgrounds, and they are like animation stuff.

[tech_guy]

Could it not have been Samurise?

 

http://lifehacker.com/software/plain-text/geek-to-live--incorporate-text-files-onto-your-desktop-213280.php

 

We use it here to annoy the hell out of people!