So after a couple tweaks I made my Time Stacks widget available publicly and after two days of being live it’s the highest ranked clock widget on Chumby.

Whoo hoo!

Yesterday we launched the first version of Captions on YouTube videos.

Video owners can now add multiple closed captioning files to their videos in over 120 languages.

Here’s the original blog post:
New Captions Feature For Videos

FlashForward was just in San Francisco and this was the first one I’ve been to that was run by Metalliq and not Lynda.com.

We had a booth right near the entrance and had a lot of foot traffic. Between the office, booth, and conference, I only made to a few sessions. Unfortunately the general buzz of the conference was disappointment.

Instead of the usual format of multiple sessions running at the same time, Metalliq daisy-chained all of the session into a large dark auditorium with no tables and instead of having inspirational and learning sessions they also decided to go with all inspirational. So new Flash users who were hoping to learn something were stuck watching portfolio and site reviews of more advanced designers and developers without gaining any knowledge on how to reach that level.

The last day of the conference I was talking to one Metalliq organizers and they mentioned that they were happy with the turn out but realized they need to switch it up for the next conference.

In either case, it was great catching up with my Flash friends and I made some new ones as well. 

Here’s YouTube’s blog post, Video Annotations Now Display On Embeds and some samples:

]]> http://www.usingutensils.com/design/let-the-embedding-begin/feed/ 0 http://www.usingutensils.com/design/%c2%a1viva-la-anotaciones/ http://www.usingutensils.com/design/%c2%a1viva-la-anotaciones/#comments Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:09:29 +0000 jasson http://www.usingutensils.com/?p=185

Whoo Hoo… a few days ago we launched Annotations internationally! 

On a completely unrelated note, Happy 4^th of July! 

This took creativity… this guy annotated a video on how to play Nirvana’s “Come as you are”. Besides tips, he included sheet music!

Nirvana Guitar How-To

Whoo hoo… Annotations are live on YouTube!

This has been one of the projects I’ve been working on for months now with teams all over the world and it has been awesome to see everyone’s reaction to the product.

What are Video Annotations… I think the about page can explain it better than I can

Video Annotations are a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos! Use them to:

• Add background information about the video.
• Create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene)
• Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video
• All of the above!

You control what the annotations say, where they appear on the video, and when they appear and disappear.

Watch out interweb… here comes the new YouTube player

I don’t normally talk about work on here, but I am unbelievably excited about the new YouTube player. After months of planning, rewriting, and testing we finally launched the our new player a few days ago!

The internal plumbing is top-notch and it’s absolutely gorgeous thanks to our amazing Flash Engineer, Richard, and our Visual Design guru, Omar.

Say hello to my little friend…

I’ve been pining over them since they were first announced and this Christmas a few of my friends got me a Chumby. They may not look like a whole lot, but they’re little Linux computers that run Flash apps with a touch screen and motion detectors.

For the non-geeks, it’s a mini-computer that is an internet radio, alarm clock, digital photo frame, stock ticker, email notifier, et al. all in one.

I’ve been playing around with creating widgets for it. However right now Fuzzy Time is the only open to the public. The other ones are still being tweaked, but once I finish them I’ll post them to Chumby and here.

Fuzzy Time

Currently one of the featured widgets for the Chumby, this simple widget I created that displays the current time in English the way a human would read it. Check it out here:
]]> http://www.usingutensils.com/design/chumby-widgets/feed/ 0 http://www.usingutensils.com/design/fitc-in-the-gta/ http://www.usingutensils.com/design/fitc-in-the-gta/#comments Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:45:24 +0000 jasson http://www.jassonschrock.com/blog/random-thoughts/fitc-in-the-gta/ As a kid I was occasionally confused by Big Bird when he was talking about the last letter of the alphabet… one day it would be the letter “Zee” and the next it was “Zed”. I guess that’s what happens when you grow up close enough to the Canadian border and watch Sesame Street in US English as well as Canadian English and French. (At that time, they didn’t have cable in my hometown, but we had a fancy rotating antenna that could pick up channels from all over the place. )

The last few days I’ve been in Toronto for the FITC conference and it’s amazing how much it feels like I’m back home. It’s not that I spent a lot time in Toronto; it’s more that the people and products feel familiar:

• Dundas, Spadina, Bloor, Jarvis, et al. – Some of my favorite Toronto street names that you never hear in the states.
• CFNY 102.1 The Edge – Still my favorite radio station… however KITS Live 105.3 in the Bay Area is a close second.
• Tim Horton’s – My favorite coffee shop chain… their coffee definitely kicks Dunkin Donut’s ass! (I’m sure a few of my friend’s in / from Massachusetts will disagree with that comment. )
• Swiss Chalet and Harvey’s – Good ol’ fashion Canadian restaurants with chicken and burgers respectively.
• President’s Choice – Canadian food brand sold in multiple stores… think of it as Trader Joes without the storefront.
• The Bay – Canada’s version of Sears
• Pizzaville – Not the best pizza in the world, but they have the best tag line. For years they’ve been running commercial skits of a guy with a thick British accent correcting people’s confusion over the store’s phone number, “Remember the number is NOT seven, free sex, free sex, free sex… it’s 7-36-36-36”.

Enough about the GTA… back to the FITC conference.