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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking to see what I do when I'm not blogging, visit jmx2.com for a taste. Thanks for stopping by!

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Video

iPhone 3G S Unboxing

I had my video camera set up waiting for Fed Ex to deliver my phone. Let’s unbox this thing.

As a followup the video. After waiting about 5 hours for my phone to activate, I called AT&T. It seems some numbers in the activation codes were incorrect on my account. The guy was really helpful and nice. He had my phone working in about 10 minutes. Excellent.

Part 2: Unboxing the Kindle 2

On the same day my new Asus 100HE showed up, that’s the Part 1 to this entry if you’re wondering, my other highly anticipated electronic purchase arrived on the same day, the Kindle 2. For fans of nice packaging, I think you’ll get a good sense of the nice package design Amazon has made for the Kindle 2.

(Like the previous video, the audio is a little too low, but you’ll still get to see the unboxing.)

After playing with the Kindle 2, I love it. My only hurdle has been getting used to the joystick nub. I’ve been a happy Kindle 1 owner for a year and will have to get used to the new navigation scheme. I can tell I’ll get used to it quickly though.

How to build an AS3 Videoplayer Class

I recently worked on a project that needed a video player. I didn’t want to use the standard one’s included with Flash, so I did a little searching and found The Tech Labs, a tutorial site. Rafael Nünlist wrote an excellent post there called “How to build a AS3 Videoplayer.” He not only has a nicely designed video player, but he also shared the code for the world to see. Rafael wrote most of the code in the video player I’m going to show you.

I decided his video player looked perfect for my project, but I needed the video player as a class, not ActionScript on the timeline of my main movie. (I noticed Jake Rutter posted a comment on The Tech Labs asking for a class of the same thing.) In the same spirit that Rafael shared his creation with the everyone, I wanted to do the same with my iteration of his project.

I’ve made a few modifications to Rafael’s original code that I want to point out.

Since the video player is now a class, you need the ability to know it’s fully loaded before you give it a video to play. If you didn’t wait for it to be ready, you’d get an error when you gave it a video URL to try to play. It now broadcasts an event when it’s ready called SGLoadEvent.LOADED.

In making it a class, I hard coded the location of the graphics to a folder called “library” in the same directory as your SWF. While doing this, I put some of the controls for the videoplay in movieclip containers. There were a few references to their pixel positions in the script and I updated those to be pulled dynamically from the graphics in hopes that it makes it easier to edit how it looks. There are references to these new movieclips in the Action Script as well.

I’ve also used the popular GreenSock Tweens to have the video fade up for .25 seconds at the start of play and fade out for .5 seconds when a video ends.

Lastly, I gave the loadVideo function an extra parameter that allows you to choose whether you want to autoplay the video once it’s loaded.

How do you make it work?

I’ve made a zipped archive of the all the classes you’ll need plus the FLAs and SWFs for you to check out.

Here’s all the code you need to make it work:

import SGVideoPlayer;
import SGLoadEvent;
var videoPlayer:SGVideoPlayer = new SGVideoPlayer();

var fullsizePath:String="videofiles/EllenFeiss.flv";

videoPlayer.addEventListener(SGLoadEvent.LOADED, playerReady);

function playerReady(e:SGLoadEvent) {
	// be sure to remove your LOADED event listener otherwise your videoplayer will continue to issue the Play command making your Stop button not fuction properly
	videoPlayer.removeEventListener(SGLoadEvent.LOADED, playerReady);
	addChild(videoPlayer);
	// to autoplay the video change the 'false' to 'true'
	videoPlayer.loadVideo(fullsizePath, false);
	centerMyVideo(videoPlayer);
}

You’ll see I snuck in a call to centerMyVideo(). That uses a couple extra functions in the class that return the heigh and width of your video player.

Here’s that function:

function centerMyVideo(yourVideoPlayer:SGVideoPlayer) {
	var vpWidth:Number=yourVideoPlayer.getWidth();
	var vpHeight:Number=yourVideoPlayer.getHeight();

	var stWidth:Number=stage.stageWidth;
	var stHeight:Number=stage.stageHeight;

	trace("vpWidth: ", vpWidth);

	yourVideoPlayer.x = (stWidth - vpWidth)/2;
	yourVideoPlayer.y = (stHeight - vpHeight)/2;
}

Download ZIP of Class and example files.

How Does User-Generated Backlash Effect Sales? Was Toyota Saved by Zero?

If you’re reading this post (and you live in the USA) around the time I writing it, there is no need to show you Toyota’s Saved By Zero commercial. It has been played to death on the airwaves. What makes it unique is some magical mojo of that claws at the nerves. (If you want to watch it for a little refresher, I’ve included it at the very end of this post.)

For some reason, this spot has garnered a very special ire. It’s probably got a lot to do with the economic panic that we’re under combined with the cloyingly upbeat rendition of Saved By Zero by The Fixx. I’ve had conversations with friends about this spot and how obnoxious the idea of 0% financing is to them at a time when Great Depression tinted news is the story of the day every day.

There’s a particularly well-done mocking of this spot below, mashing it up with The Ring. It’s an excellent example how consumer backlash can become an art form.

I can watch this mocking of Toyota’s spot was great fun, but I wonder how it really effects the sales of Toyota vehicles? Does it make me think they’re any less sturdy? Does it drive me into the arms of GM or Ford? Although I don’t own a car or plan to buy one, the answer for me is no.

All auto makers are hurting. Every one of them is down in sales. Take a look at the latest Edmund’s report on November call sale in this write from the Wall Street Journal. Here are the numbers they mention:

• Chrysler - down 42%
• Ford Motor - down 33%
• Nissan - down 29%
• General Motors Corp. - down 28%
• Toyota Motor Corp. - down 24%
• Honda Motor Co. - down 21%

Yes, all are down badly. Toyota, with what I’m guessing is the most hated car ad on TV right now, is doing pretty good, relatively speaking. Maybe they were saved by zero after all.

What should Toyota do with all the free media they’re getting right now regarding the emotions garnered by this spot? Maybe they could embrace it. Should they encourage people to mix this up some more. Let people have fun with it. Everyone needs a little escapism now and they’ve accidentally got a head start in letting people have it.

There's more to read. Click here for the rest. >>

YouTubification of Election 2008, Paris Hilton Responds

I expected some response by Barack Obama’s team to John McCain’s recent ad that compared Obama’s popularity to Paris Hilton’s fame in an effort to make him seem less worthy of the office of president. Team Obama can sit back though because Paris Hilton has stepped into the fray.

Paris, I am impressed. Bravo.