Create video and audio players from scratch, widget code sharing, new events, actions, DoubleClick ad integration, and more!
by Josh, Wednesday, November 19 2008, 05:00 PM by
Create Your Own Players From Scratch You can now customize every design element of your video and audio players, including buttons and controls, complete with rollover effects.
Video and audio players are usually composed of a progress/"scrubber" bar, volume control, and a few buttons. Before now, if you wanted to tweak the look and feel of just one of these elements--say, design your own play button--, or if you wanted to re-position them to create your own custom layout, you couldn't. Now you can. Every element of our video and audio players can now be selected, skinned, and configured individually. It's so customizable that you can literally draw what you want your player to look like on a piece of paper, scan it, and come out with something like this:
That's exactly what David did to create this widget. (Tip: when working on an image like this, make the area where you want the video to appear transparent, and save it as a .png.) This widget is composed of the new Video, Scrubber, and Volume components (available under the Components tab), along with buttons that have been assigned new actions for Play, Pause, Open Syndication Menu, and Toggle Full Screen mode. We've also released two new players built from these new components and actions: Advanced Video Player and Advanced Audio Player can be found under the Players tab. Use them as is or as templates for building your own custom players. Hats off to David again for creating the shiny new default skins for these players. To help jump-start your own custom player designs, you can also download .psd's containing all the images used in these players.
New Events
Previously if you wanted something to happen in a widget, you had to wait for the user to click on something and then you could execute a Click Action. Now you can trigger actions on a variety of events. In addition to the Click event, you can also execute actions on rollover, rollout, "media has been playing in X player for Y seconds", and "X component has not been clicked for Y seconds".
Share Your Widgets Between KickApps Accounts Building widgets just got social. Now you can export and share fully-editable versions of your widgets with anyone who has a KickApps affiliate account. Coming soon: Updates to the KickDeveloper Widget Gallery allowing you to upload, share and rate designs with the whole community.
To share a widget, open the widget that you'd like to share, then click Menu > Export. Your widget code will be copied to your clipboard.
To import a widget, click Menu > Import and paste the widget code into the pop-up.
Monetize Your Videos with DoubleClick We've added DoubleClick to the list of video ad networks we support with our drag & drop interface, giving you another way to get the most out of your video content. This adds to our support for pre- and post- role video, Google Adsense for Video, 24/7, Adap.tv and ScanScout, making it easier than ever to monetize your editorial and user-generated video.
