Archive for the ‘Multimedia’ Category

File Under: Multimedia
Sep
28
2012

Timeline Traces How the Web Became the Web

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Everything begins in The Garden of Forking Paths. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

The history of the web is long and convoluted; so long and convoluted, in fact, that putting together a complete picture can be overwhelming.

John Allsopp, who has logged quite a few years helping shape web history, was undaunted by the winding story of the web and recently launched The Web History Timeline Project to help map it out.

The goal isn’t to cover the entire history of the web; rather, Allsopp is interested in “the most important milestones in the history of ideas, whether they’re the publication of seminal articles and books, the publication of important standards and RFCs, the release of important software (browsers, servers, tools, libraries) or significant events, such as the founding of the W3C.” And The Web History Timeline isn’t just a static document; you can suggest “significant milestones in the history of web design and development” yourself using the Google Docs form over on Allsopp’s site.

The big question with the history of the web is always, Where do you start? How far back does the idea behind the web actually go? Vannevar Bush’s famous essay, As We May Think, in which he describes the Memex, “a sort of mechanized private file and library,” is a popular jumping-off point, but Allsopp opts to go even further back in the stack to Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story The Garden of Forking Paths. Starting with Borges helps make our liberal arts degrees feel a little bit less useless, so we’re all for that starting point.

The Web History Timeline isn’t just informative; it looks great too. The project was built with Verite’s Timeline.js library, which handles most of the design heavy lifting. For more info on Timeline.js, check out the project page or grab the code from GitHub.

It’s also worth noting that we first heard about The Web History Timeline project on Eric Meyer and Jen Simmon’s new podcast The Web Behind, on which Allsopp was the inaugural guest. That episode is well worth a listen, and be sure to add the feed to your favorite podcast app for more on the early days of the web.

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File Under: Multimedia
Sep
26
2012

Google Street View Dives Into the Great Barrier Reef

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Google Street View: Sunset over the Great Barrier Reef. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Google Maps’ Street View feature long ago left the street, with “street views” of hiking trails, tours through famous museums and panoramas of the Amazon Basin. Now Google is going even further, diving into the world’s coral reefs to add underwater panoramic images to Google Maps.

To see the new underwater imagery head over to Google Maps and check out a sea turtle swimming among a school of fish or the Great Barrier Reef at sunset. There’s also a new Barrier Reef page on Google’s World Wonders Project which has some more interactive panoramas.

The reef imagery isn’t limited to just the Great Barrier Reef; you can also explore the Apo Island marine reserve in the Philippines or explore Oahu’s Hanauma Bay and Maui’s Molokini crater in Hawaii.

For the curious, no, Google didn’t actually drive its Street View cars and trikes onto fragile reefs around the world; the company is getting the new underwater images from the Catlin Seaview Survey, an ongoing scientific study of the world’s reefs.

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Services
Sep
19
2012

Make Your Movies Pay With Vimeo’s New ‘Tip Jar’

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Image: H.L.I.T./Flickr.

Popular video-sharing site Vimeo has added a tip jar, which allows Vimeo users to accept payments from anyone who enjoys their movies.

To use the new Tip Jar you’ll need to be a Vimeo Plus or Vimeo Pro member, but provided you’re already set up with a paid account, enabling it is as simple as adding a PayPal account and checking a box on the video’s advanced settings page. Once that’s done a “Tip This Video” button will appear underneath the video player on Vimeo.com, allowing viewers to leave tips in appreciation for your cinéma vérité efforts.

The fine print taketh away a 15 percent service fee and you’ll need to have a verified PayPal account in order to claim your money. Also note that you cannot accept tips on commercial or political videos, nor can you use Tip Jar as a way to raise money for a political cause.

Obviously Tip Jar probably isn’t going to make you a millionaire in most cases, but if your video goes viral to a particularly generous audience — who knows?

For a more reliable way of making money on Vimeo, the company also plans to roll out a pay-per-view service later this year. The pay-per-view offering appears to be limited to Vimeo Pro members. The Vimeo blog offers little in the way of details, saying only that pay-per-view will add “tools to charge for access to your videos, with no coding required.”

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File Under: HTML5, Multimedia
Aug
30
2012

Microsoft, Atari Bring Arcade Classics to the Web

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Centipede in HTML on the iPad. Image:Screenshot/Webmonkey

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team has partnered with Atari to re-imagine classic Atari games for the modern web. That’s right, Centipede, Asteroids, Missile Command and half a dozen more all re-written using HTML5 and JavaScript.

If you’d like to play, point your browser to the new Atari Arcade and enjoy the glory of Pong, Super Breakout and the rest of the Atari back catalog.

While the games look a bit different — the graphics aren’t exactly what you might remember from the arcades of your youth, hence the “re-imagining” — the game play is faithful to the originals, especially on a touch screen where the controls are more like the classic arcade button layouts.

For those curious to know how it all works, the answer is largely CreateJS, though for full details be sure to read through the developer documentation. You can even create your own HTML5 Game on top of the new Atari Arcade SDK.

For more details on how it all works check out the video below featuring developer Grant Skinner and the rest of the team behind Atari Arcade.

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File Under: JavaScript, Multimedia
Aug
27
2012

Tired of Tiny Movies? Go Large With BigVideo.js

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Size matters. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Nothing grabs a user’s attention like a big, full-window video on a landing page. For example, check out Path.com. However, with all the various screens potentially connecting to your site these days, making sure your movie plays full-window on all of them can be tricky.

That’s where BigVideo.js comes in. Developer John Polacek‘s BigVideo is a jQuery plugin for adding big background videos to your site. The plugin makes it easy to drop in a single video URL and get fit-to-fill background video that takes up the whole window. The script will fall back to displaying an image on devices where video doesn’t work.

BigVideo can also handle playlists, serving up a series of videos, as well as a very cool feature to play videos without the sound. And yes, you can (and should) add a button to allow users to turn the video off altogether. That said, I left BigVideo open, running in a background tab for several days and it didn’t have a noticeable impact on performance.

For more info, head over to the GitHub page where you can see BigVideo in action, get a full list of features and grab the code for your own site.

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