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You may have noticed our new Settings Interface has been redesigned so let me explain how this works. We have introduced more categories within the interface to help you find the exact setting you require faster.

Global settings allows you to make changes to all videos within your vzaar account and all future uploads. Here you can brand your player, change your encoding settings, manage which domains your videos are playable on and much much more! Any changes you decide to make on a per video level will override the global settings for that specific video. Pictured below, is the global settings interface with the Security tab active.

Global Settings

Per Video Settings

Along with the new design and categorization to the global settings interface, you will also see that the Settings tab within your video interface now houses the same interface with selected settings which are available to you on a per video basis – giving you more freedom to customize individual videos.

One of our newest features is our Color Picker. Along with the preset color schemes which have been with vzaar for a long time, you can now create a player based on your own color scheme. The color picker lets your select from a variety of colors, the option to make that color lighter or darker, and, if you’re an advanced user, you can enter your own hexadecimal colour values into the input fields provided.

This is available on both your global settings and individual videos. We are really excited by this new addition and we hope your are too!

Per video settings


We hope you find using our new interface more intuitive, beneficial and easy to use. As we continue to add functionality to our player we will continue to provide you with an easy way to implement this.

We’d love to know your thoughts!

Aaron

Categories Feature, News
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What’s more daunting than delivering a presentation about how to make things look pretty to a bunch of super talented Ruby developers? Yeah, I’m struggling to think of something too.

This morning I gave a talk about CSS techniques used on the vzaar website. I decided to start from the ground up as I had no idea how much they already knew. I covered some basic CSS3 properties such as border radius, some more complex properties like applying transitions using the transform property, showcased some examples used within our website and shared some useful sites and apps to get started.

I guess everyone who does any kind of programming gets some sort of buzz out of it, for me it’s making sites look nice, for example, the ability to have a text shadow without even opening photoshop is great. For these guys it’s all about well structured code in order to make applications run smoothly and efficiently, so a lot of the front-end design can easily get overlooked.

To some people, CSS might be regarded as an easy programming language, “oh look, I can change the background colour from red to blue. I’m super smart”, but, without the front end, we’d all be clicking underlined blue links in times new roman font. Whether you think CSS is simple or not, with some of the new properties that are available within the latest spec, such as the transition and transform effects, I think CSS should be regarded as one of the more important programming languages regardless of how simple some of it might be.

I think the talk went well, questions were asked at the end too! If you’d like to see the slides from the presentation, you can view them here. I wrote this yesterday afternoon and created an example website late last night using the rather poor internet connection in the hotel bar. Got there in the end though. I will be writing another blog about my time working here at Applicake tomorrow, so be sure to watch out for that.

I now expect the applicake website to have a border radius on EVERYTHING! ;D

Enjoy,

Aaron

Categories News
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Categories Business Thoughts, News
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Team Outing

Aaron
article by:

Last Friday saw all of us here at vzaar take the foot off the gas a little (quite literally) as we attended an off site team building day.

This gave us a chance to asses future developments, have a look at what else is out there – and more importantly – what isn’t!

But before all of this took place, Adrian had a challenge up his sleeve in order to help us get into the creative state of mind… The Marshmallow Challenge to be precise! (You can read more here: http://www.marshmallowchallenge.com/Instructions.html

In a nutshell, we divided into teams and had 18 minutes to build a freestanding Spaghetti tower which could hold a marshmallow. Using only 20 spaghetti sticks, a yard of tape and a yard of string, Stephen and myself knew exactly what we were doing, so much so, we spent the first 10 minutes talking and snapping the spaghetti sticks in half for a reason neither of us could justify. Ian and Mauricio were busy crafting elegant looking triangles and all we could do was wonder why we now had even more spaghetti sticks that we started with.

The Marshmallow Challenge - 10 Minutes In...

The Marshmallow Challenge - 10 Minutes In...

As the 18 minutes came to an end, Ian and Mauricio, who got off to a flyer, were left stunned as Stephen and myself had somehow crafted a free standing tower reaching a staggering 18″ WITH the marshmallow sitting pretty at the top. Good job!

Ian and Mauricio with their GIANT Doritos...

Ian and Mauricio with their GIANT Doritos...

Behold...! The Rising Tower of Mallow!

Behold...! The Rising Tower of Mallow!

Here’s some Highlights…

After lunch we descended on Surbiton Raceway for an afternoon of go-karting! Now for me, this WAS a challenge seeing as I’m the only one at vzaar not to of driven a car before – and it had just been raining. Great.

The session was split into two 22 minute chunks with the overall winner being crowned for the highest number of laps completed. So, all I had to do was just go round and round without spinning off, right? Easy.

A few laps into the first session, who’s first to go… Yep – it’s me. 3/4 laps later… and I’m off again. I could hear Murray Walker giving me a right earful. As I was going round I began to improve, not knowing who I was overtaking as I could only identify the others by looking at their shoes. Something I will take on board next time.

The first session is over… this gives me chance to stretch my fingers as I could feel the cramp settling in. Does this happen to normal drivers?
Whilst the rest of team vzaar take a brief peak at their laps times I was trying to work out how to keep hold of a lead – I was first into the pits, which means first out. Woo-hoo.

Twenty-two minutes later I’d been overtaken just the once – only for that mystery driver to spin out half a lap later – as did all my fellow drivers throughout the second session. Surely this advantage had me on the podium?

Team vzaar – Karting Challenge 2010 Results
1st Stephen McCluskey
2nd Adrian Sevitz
3rd Aaron Rodgers
4th Ian Snead
5th Mauricio Rocha

I came Third! Pretty chuffed with myself to be honest. Felt like a victory!

We decided to keep the champagne. honest.

We decided to keep the champagne. honest.

There we have it… a great team building day had by all!

Categories by vzaar, News
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Congratulations to Team Resistance!

Aaron
article by:

Cue The Beatles’ 1970′s hit ‘The Long and Winding Road’ as Team Resistance have completed their 10,000 mile journey from Goodward (UK) all the way to Bataar, Mongolia. In a 1998 Toyota Rav-4.

Team Resistance, which included Phil Moreton, Elisabeth Schusser, Murat Akyildiz and Emily Turton started the Top Gear style challenge at the end of July in support of Mercy Corps to help raise money for local communities in Mongolia.

We at vzaar were proud to be one of the teams sponsors throughout their remarkable journey.

You can read the teams blog here.

Below, are some pictures of the car, with our logo taking prime position…

Well done Guys, from all of us here at vzaar!

vzaar sponsors team resistance

vzaar sponsors team resistance

vzaar sponsors team resistance

Categories Chatter, News, Team vzaar
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