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Vikki Dawson, The Internet Eye Magazine
iNavigate 3.3 is an innovative product that allows you to create dynamic explorer style menus quickly and easily. It gives you a variety of options for how your menu should work. It takes only a few minutes to create a professional looking menu for your web pages.
Because iNavigate uses XML, browsers that can view the menus create with it are IE 5 and above and NS 6 and above.
The Global Menu Properties dialog allows you to control the overall operations of your menu. The Group Name will allow you to run several different iNavigate menus throughout your web site because you can give each menu a unique name. You can set the Start Folder (generally the root web folder) and the iNavigate Folder (a sub folder).
The rest of the options on this dialog are pretty much self explanatory. I like the Auto Close Menus option. When you have already opened part of the menu structure and you click on a different part of the menu structure, the first one closes which means you don't have a menu running 5 pages down your screen.
Using the Global Frames Properties dialog you can generate dynamic menus for a frames based web
site. Some other menu builders available out there don't really work well when generating menus for frames based web sites.
With the Global ToolTip Properties dialog you can create your own tool tip text for the open and close menus.
The Global Path Properties dialog allows you to customize the way the path is generated.
The Global Graphic Naming Conventions dialog lets you decide what you want your blank, plus and minus images to be named.
The Page dialog allows you to enter the basic page information. You can choose whether the page is a
Regular Page (which most are), a Home Page, a Sub Page or a Foreign Page.
From the Captions dialog you can specify the captions for the individual menu items.
Ah, here's a fun one. You don't have to stick with the run of the mill plus and minus signs.
Create your own custom images and then let iNavigate know what and where they are.
Check this out! With iNavigate you can even use QueryStrings!
The Edit menu allows you to insert nodes, delete nodes, move the nodes up and down, edit with NotePad or with a different editor.
While you're working on your menu structure you can easily preview it from the view menu options and you can check and see what the XML actually looks like.
Below is a screenshot of what happened when I clicked on View>XML. Pretty cool! So not only will
iNavigate generate menus for you, you might learn something in the process.
Before you can preview your menu you need to save it and then generate it. At that point you can use
the preview button on the toolbar to open your menu in your browser.
The options dialog allows you to set the path to your HTML editor.
Below are two screenshots of what the menu looks like in iNavigate and what the read out looks like after generating a menu structure.
The help file is absolutely impressive! It covers everything!
Take a look at the multitude of features:
Unlimited Menu Depths
With iNavigate you can create unlimited menu depths, only restricted by your allocated menu area on your website.
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Single HTML Source Code
The menu HTML is the same on every page, iNavigate finds the menu item matching the current page and highlights it automatically.
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State Persistence
Menus stay open or closed as you navigate through the site, iNavigate uses session Cookies to stores the states and automatically restore them on the next page.
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Automatic Synchronization
iNavigate menus automatically follow as the user navigates through your site using links on the page. Follow this link to the Customization Section to see the effect.
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Multiple Graphics
iNavigate allows you to customize the menu graphics, right down to individual menu item level.
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Graceful degradation
iNavigate menus start life as real HTML, so the menus always render in their open state so other and older browsers (including Netscape 4.x and Opera) or if JavaScript is disabled. Where many other menu systems are either non-functional or even completely blank.
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Server Application Compatibility
Backend server applications typically use a particular URL and query string structure for routing and communication. iNavigate gives you complete flexibility to identify the corresponding menu item using strings or regular expressions.
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Sub Page Support
If you have sub-pages below a page on the menu structure you can still get iNavigate to identify and highlight the parent page on the menu. The beauty of this is you don't need to include every single page on the menu structures!
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Menu Group Support
You can have several instances of the menu structure on your site, say in different tabbed areas like you can see at Cirkadia.com.
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Multiple Entry Points
Visitors can enter your website on any page and iNavigate will display the correct menu item. Great for bookmarked pages, external links and search engines!
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Search Engine Compatible
Because the menu structures start life as real HTML, search engines can see the links in the menu items. The generated links created by JavaScript based systems are just not there for the search engines.
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No Frames Dependency
The real HTML approach also means that you are not limited to using frames as with server side components and most JavaScript based solutions.
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Explicit Frames Mode
Explicit frames mode support in the script. The Frame containing the iNavigate menu sets the new Frames property.
Each page includes calls to the new PrepareFrame and LocateFrame methods, all other iNavigate properties are set in the normal way after PrepareFrame and before LocateFrame.
The supplied template code features 're-framing' for the best search engine compatibility. Search engines typically link visitors to an 'orphaned' page outside the intended frame structure, resulting in a less-than-ideal experience for your visitor. The re-framing code causes the orphaned page to be re-loaded automatically inside the appropriateframe structure.
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Automatic Text Font/Size Adjustment
The design of iNavigate automatically allows for dynamic text font and size alteration, keeping graphics correctly aligned.
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100% Client-Side Processing
Requires no Component or Plug-in downloads or any server interaction other than the regular http page download.
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Example (at Cirkadia)
If you're like me and you just get bored or overwhelmed by creating a menu structure, or you just don't have the programming skill to create one as cool as the iNavigate dynamic menus the iNavigate is the tool to have!
Head on over to Cirkadia and check out the menus in action but also download the free version to try it for yourself before you buy.
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