The Client: Thomson Reuters’ clients are savvy and busy. They knew that if the site was going to reach them, it had to be fast, solid and engaging.

My Role: Developer in small, focused group to create the prototype and an on-site advisor during integration with their existing systems.

The Technology: The client needed to integrate the site into their CMS but they had asked us to create and test a prototype site before handing it over. We built the original with very limited PHP since we knew TR would be using .NET in the end but PHP allowed our team to quickly build the prototype. The site uses a custom Flash video player and also has a limited but useful mobile version. This mobile version was very important to the client as the majority of their customers regularly use BlackBerrys and other mobile devices. During integration a few technical hurdles appeared from use of their legacy systems but because I was on-site at the time, launch was not affected.

The Highlights: Multiple video players used in conjunction with jQuery UI tabs. Animated main navigation.

What’s happening: While animating, jQuery needs to add a few style definitions if they are not already declared. Among these is the ‘overflow’ property. jQuery sets this to ‘hidden’ in order to show the animation and then removes this declaration upon completion of the animation. When the declaration is removed, Flash gets the signal to re-render the movie (because, possibly, the layout of the page has changed).

How to fix it: declare ‘overflow:hidden’ in the CSS for the element. Voilá, the flickering is gone.