Holomatix - Pre-Loader

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Pre-Loader

A preloader is used to display a specified image while the browser downloads the Blaze presentation files (.jar and .swf).

This is useful to replace the Sun Java sunflower image appearing at the beginning of loading a Java applet, with an image that is more suited to your 3D presentation.

The additional files needed to deploy a preloader in a Blaze 3D presentation are:

preload.jar (download it here and rename from .zip to .jar)
an image file (the user should create this in a .gif or .jpg format)

The HTML code of a normal Blaze presentation and that of a Blaze presentation using a preloader is listed below.

Standard HTML page for a Blaze presentation

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Holomatix Blaze 3D</title>
    </head>
    <BODY scroll='no' BGCOLOR="#ffffff" TEXT="#000000" leftmargin="0" topmargin="0"
marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">
        <applet archive=holomatix.jar code=blaze3d.class width=604 height=447 MAYSCRIPT>
            <param name=src value="holomatix.swf">
            <font face="Arial">You don't have Java installed/enabled. Please enable or download and
            install <a href="http://www.java.com" target="_blank">Java Virtual Machine</a> for your browser
            </font>
        </applet>
    </body>
</html>

Preload HTML page for a Blaze presentation

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Holomatix Blaze 3D</title>
    </head>
    <BODY scroll='no' BGCOLOR="#ffffff" TEXT="#000000" leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">
        <applet archive=preload.jar,holomatix.jar code=preload.class width=604 height=447 MAYSCRIPT>
            <param name="imagefile" value="preload.gif">
            <param name=src value="holomatix.swf">
            <font face="Arial">You don't have Java installed/enabled. Please enable or download and install <a href="http://www.java.com" target="_blank">Java
Virtual Machine</a> for your browser</font>
        </applet>
    </body>

</html>

The differences in the preloader HTML code from the default Blaze 3D presentation HTML code sample are:

to specify the file preloader.jar in the applet archive tag. Thus a Blaze presentation using a preloader will consist of two .jar files(preload.jar and holomatix.jar). The smaller preload.jar file is downloaded and run first which will quickly load the specified image file. This image will remain displayed until the Blaze 3D presentation is completely downloaded.
to specify the use of preload.class (of the preload.jar) in the applet code tag. This differs from a normal Blaze presentation which loads the blaze3d.class of the holomatix.jar.
to include an additional parameter line that specifies which image file should be loaded. The valid image file types are .gif or .jpg files.

Note that the file size of the preload image determines how long the user will have to wait until the image is displayed. For this reason, the preload image should be kept as small as possible to reduce the download time.

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