Kato homepage design update

[David]

The design of the home page for Kato Japan has been tweaked recently

 

http://www.katomodels.com/

 

The new front page shifts the right sidebar down in order to provide more space for a big format flash display which cycles through new, large format images of Kato products (previously a smaller static image was used to show new/upcoming items). What makes this a bit special is it seems Kato has put some work into making good pictures - the new pictures are complete scenes, often with several other new or upcoming Kato items shown together in a quality layout. I particularly like the city scene with the new E127 and 115 models. I need to look into how to either expand the flash advert, or extract the images - unless you are on a 24" monitor, you are likely seeing a downsized image; the real images seem to be several megapixels.

[to2leo]

Please do and share with us!  I wish the pictures are downloadable as in the past.

[David]

Please do and share with us!  I wish the pictures are downloadable as in the past.

 

Unfortunately the easy way is out - I checked and the images appear to be embedded directly into the flash file, not loaded seperately as resource (makes for a >1MB flash file, though I doubt anyone in 100mb broadband Japan would even blink, even us 5mb users get the file pretty fast these days). Next step is to get it on a machine with Macromedia and see if the file is copy protected.

[Martijn Meerts]

I have to say, it's silly of Kato to use Flash for a picture slideshow, especially since there aren't even any nice transitions between the pictures. A couple of lines of Javascript would've done the same job =)

 

I don't think the images are getting scaled down by Flash, I've worked with Flash a LOT, and scaling down images in Flash itself gives crappy results in general. So, if you really want those pictures, just get a screen capture ;)

[to2leo]

Good idea! The KISS philosophy...Keep It Simple and Stupid.