The lightbox they are using is FancyZoom, by Cabel Sasser of Panic (Transmit) fame. The movie player looks to be something Tim Plumb coded (no credits, but it looks like his style of JavaScript) and it’s using an iframe to hold the bare movie, thus leaving things as much up to the browser as possible. Since you can link to a “bare” mp4 and have it just work in an iDevice (as long as it was encoded with the correct flavor of mp4) then that seems to be the way this gets either the desktop or the tablet browsers to work with the same content.
If you have to support people without QuickTime (so the 8% of the developed world that still does not own an iPod) then I don’t know how you would get around this at the moment.
I have tested it with QuickTime X plugin and QuickTime 7 plugin, in
Safari and Firefox, on Leopard and Snow Leopard. And it also just
works on the iPhone. Anyone who looks at it on Windows and reports
back gets a cookie. (Baked by the little girl in the first movie,
who’s getting ready to choose a college now…)
Walter
On Jan 15, 2011, at 9:31 AM, waltd wrote:
The lightbox they are using is FancyZoom, by Cabel Sasser of Panic
(Transmit) fame. The movie player looks to be something Tim Plumb
coded (no credits, but it looks like his style of JavaScript) and
it’s using an iframe to hold the bare movie, thus leaving things as
much up to the browser as possible. Since you can link to a “bare”
mp4 and have it just work in an iDevice (as long as it was encoded
with the correct flavor of mp4) then that seems to be the way this
gets either the desktop or the tablet browsers to work with the same
content.
If you have to support people without QuickTime (so the 8% of the
developed world that still does not own an iPod) then I don’t know
how you would get around this at the moment.
This tested fine on an iPhone. It opens QT and plays. On an iPad it shows a gray lightbox and the audio, but no video. Is there a setting that needs to be changed? I couldn’t find anything in Settings.
Yeah, that is messed up on iPad. I had high hopes, based on my testing with the phone, but I guess there’s something else going on with the iPad’s browser.
As far as I know, there are no settings on the iOS–that’s part of its charm.
Okay, this had to be done a completely different way, but the upshot of this is that you may be able to play it on a PC without much effort, and it should pop the appropriate “click here to install the ActiveX version of the plugin” magick, too.
No - seriously. HM Customs can put a value on something that arrives into the UK like this and charge import duty and also VAT.
I had an incidence where we took a kilt to a friend in California as a present. He didn’t try it on when we were there and when he did it was too small (too many beers!)
He sent it back over to me so that I could change it for a larger one. HM customs charged me £85 before they would give me my own present back!
But what the hell - he let me stay in his house in Indian Wells for 10 days for nothing - I’m not really complaining.
I have been following the scripty lightbox threads for some time now as we use some code that requires several manual settings and would like a more actions based solution.
During some research for another issue we implemented the “Spawn New Window Action” and noticed in the freeway moment on softpress the iPad friendly function. I had an ah ha moment. Is this action creating a light box affect that one could place anything inside of, video, audio text, other actions and so on?
The way that it currently works is that it includes the proper object/
embed code for QuickTime in the JavaScript, and generates that on the
fly. It could be done the other way, as long as you also use the PHP
Make Insert Page Action on the page with the code. You’d probably also
have to do something clever like put a tiny one-frame Flash movie on
the pasteboard above the outer page, so that Freeway would inject its
link to the FWObject.js code in the outer page’s head tag.
What I haven’t spent any time looking at is trying to get a combo
“QuickTime if you have it, Flash if you’re in idiot” page going. I
would encourage you to use a proper QuickTime object/embed/ActiveX as
this example does, and see how it works among the uninitiated. There
is a dialog that (should) pop up, and with a single click, the user
will see the movie through ActiveX. All subsequent movies will have
the control loaded into cache, and probably won’t even show the dialog.
Walter
On Jan 16, 2011, at 12:03 PM, george wrote:
Ok, I confirmed it worked on iPad too.
Is it going to be possible to have it link to a page within Freeway
that has embed code?
I’ve been thinking about how to implement it, not sure I’ve gotten
through all of it so far. I’m thinking that the Action should control
upload of the movie file as well as setting up the lightbox effect.
This will give me the ability to rename the files to include the
geometry (based on height and width fields in the Action) and also
link up the appropriate scripts. I’d also like to get this to handle
other file types as well as QuickTime. And the grail would be to have
it write a “video for all” style tag, where the fallbacks are all
there for any type of browser. There’s a great example of this on the diveintohtml5.org site.
But for now, you’re stuck with View Source. All of the code is inline
on the page, with the exception of prototype.js, naturally. If you
were to paste all of the JavaScript at the bottom of the page (except
the script tags themselves, and the CDATA comment tags) into
Protaculous, and then duplicate the .overlay, .overlay p, and #_closer
styles in your document, you’d have nearly the whole thing. There’s an
image called closebox.png that you’d need as well. Once you’ve done
that, you would simply add the class=“popup” to your links to the
movies, and it would just work.