Recording/screengrabbing draggable hotspots then Tweeting them!

  • Hi guys -really hoping someone can ride to my rescue again...
    I'm creating a 'choose your team' football interactive where people can drag and drop draggable hotspots of players on to a picture of a pitch (flat pano), then tweet it to show other people how they think the team should line up ahead of that weekend's match.
    I reckon I've got two choices:
    - modify the swfaddress plugin to make it record draggable hotspot positions rather than current view(I can make it tweet the current view but when you open the link in the tweet all the hotspots are back in their starting positions)
    - modify a twitter button so that it not only tweets a link to the interactive(which is probably quite straightforward), but also takes a screengrab of the current screen(including draggable hotspot positions) and includes it in the tweet(I've had a play around with the Screenshot plugin but can't get it to capture an image to the screengrab folder, let alone tweet it too!). This way, I don't need to worry about recording hotspots positions.

    Sachagriffin very kindly offered some advice back in May but I haven't had very much success. Any advice anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated.

    The whole thing is further complicated because the interactive will be embedded in a page rather than being on its own url, so I need to take this into account when tweeting urls/taking screengrabs.

    Please, someone help me start sleeping normally again rather than staying up all night staring at code! *smile*
    Thanks in advance.

  • The best way to do it, is to collect all the hotspots and send them with javascript to php to save them to a database.

    Your tweet would contain an id that would be an argument to a php/xml file that would pull the proper hotspots in.

    Otherwise, you don't really say why swfaddress isn't working for you.

    The screenshots program/plugin uses flash to create a base64 text string that can be used to mail directly. That should work for image, but not for twitter I believe. It needs a real attachment.
    I think the screenshots program can also post to a php backend and save a real image than can be used as an attachment and the email is sent from the server instead of the client.

    All this is doable.. but it takes a lot of time and is expensive in time or cost from a developer.

  • Thats cool!
    Yeah, really rich just need to interface with the swfaddress program or drop it completely and make his own setup. That's cheapest and best for few hotspots. After some limit, I imagine the URL will become too long and require an actual database backend.

    Swfaddress isn't really needed. I never figured out what it was good for over basic krpano. A startup script can easily check the query variables passed and get things going. There is even a javascript example in the krpano viewer that shows how everthing is done.

    Nice graphics Anton!

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