Drumbeat/webmademovies/all hands

Meeting: Thursday 1-2 in Very Good Very Mighty

Web Made Movies is a MoFo project to bring filmmakers and developers together to re-imagine web video. Our first output from this "lab" is Popcorn.js, a library we developed to synchronize HTML events with various types of media. We've also built a web app to author this data, which we call Butter.

We'd like to use our time at the all hands to familiarize other Mozillians with the project, but also to merge our efforts with teams working on Identity, Web Apps and implementation of video within the browser.

Our initial brain dump below:

Web Apps

• Butter would serve well as a deployable web app
  • could benefit from things like file system storage
• It looks like Mozilla's vision of web apps is focused here, and Butter could certainly leverage most of these ideas: https://apps.mozillalabs.com/gallery/
• Butter as a service: perhaps a piece of butter can act as a service to grab media for projects when you're surfing
  • i.e. see a webpage/video/image/text/etc., do some special gesture, Butter picks it up and puts it into your project (similar to F1!)
  • this would be great in a scenario where I find that I need something specific for a Butter project; I can swap out of the Butter app, start exploring the web, find what I need, and be brought right back into Butter with that asset.
  • Widgets: while it's hard to miniaturize Butter, I'm sure there are many opportunities to have pieces of it encapsulated within widgets.
  • maybe even a Butter plugin widget, which specifically reaches out to some poopcorn CDN for new plugins
  • Contact Management: We were talking a lot about how we could benefit from a semantic overhaul in which we focus on identities or locations in popcorn projects
  • if we're able to use app to store/grab information about a person's contacts, it would certainly help this initiative
• Perhaps we should think about how, if at all, Butter might be supported on mobile devices
  • compact version with 3 screens: video, timeline, and design

• Direct questions for Dan & Mike:
  • What special considerations are there, if any, that need to be addressed when converting an app-in-a-webpage to a proper Web App?
  • Experimenting with Sync: we're interested in storing Butter data for users. Can this work similarly?

Identity

• Open ID service which provides a "xxxxx@mozillafriends.com" or something
• Some variable amount of storage
  • perhaps do what github does and offer some free service, advanced service for a bit of money
• It would be really beneficial to be able to store mozilla-centric things here
  • for identity:
    • links to github projects, blogs, email addresses, fb/twitter accounts
  • for storage:
    • App storage
      • store information from Mozilla apps, like Butter
      • store preferences
      • store small files (or perhaps large ones with better account)
        • butter projects, etc.
    • copy & paste storage
      • store data to pass between devices
      • for people too lazy to email, and not equipped enough to use ssh

Video

• sequencing
  • playing clips of videos one after the other
    • all videos to be sequenced have to be fully loaded
    • need to start loading at specific point in video to avoid loading the whole thing
    • flash can do this through their streaming media server