A Different Kind of Preloader - Loading the Spikes

Most of the tutorials that talk about preloaders deal with the mechanics of building them. This tutorial is about the concept of preloaders and building one that is a little different.

If you have done any testing of your flash site using the Show Streaming tools and the bandwidth profiler, you know that the intention of the Flash creators was that we would and should design our sites to actually stream over the internet rather than loading it all up front and then playing it. We have gotten into a preloader frenzy without really thinking about how it effects the usability of the site.

Folks, IMHO a preloader should load no more than 150K worth of data...at the highest end...period. Any more than that and your dial up users are waiting longer than 40 seconds and it becomes a usability issue.

But, what if you were to design a site lean and mean - actually meant to stream over the internet? Using the bandwidth profiler, you can see where your site will stall on a 14.4 or 28.8 stream - it's the spikes that go over the red line that count. Now, those spikes are usually objects - a movie clip that appears in that frame, text that displays, a bitmap, etc.