The CIM Flash Team Blog

Oh we have so much to talk about...

Actually I may be getting a bit ahead of myself here, so lets start again with the formal introductions.

Hi, and welcome to the official Comcast Interactive Media (CIM) Flash team blog. Over the last few years, we have released quite a lot of Flash applications and we hope you have enjoyed them. As a team we have always tried to be a little ahead of the curve and deliver the best experiences on the web to you as soon as they appear.

The team blog here is an attempt to give everyone a little more insight on how we do things and once in a while come up with something that may not be an official CIM project but may be cool anyway (think data-visualization and unconventional UIs).

CIM also strives to be a Flex center for excellence and we have invested quite a bit into Flex standardizing on it for the next generation of video experiences. The Fan, CIM's flagship video player and winner of the prestigious Flash Forward User's Choice Award (Sept, 2006) is now a 100% Flex application and one of the best examples you would see in terms of skinning and MVC pattern based code. Being ahead of the curve, especially in Flex, we have also ended up developing a few tools to aid development and we are planning to release a bunch of them under open source licenses as well.

Whew ! As you can see there is quite a bit here we would like to share with you, so do stay tuned in. 2008 promises to be pretty exciting :).

The Flash team worked a bit with the team from fearnet.com a while back, integrating video within the site. We didnt have access to the Fearnet content at this time so we were just using the default videos from the Fan to debug the code. Something about this screen made me laugh:

I wonder if weather.com would consider this whenever they redesign their site ;).

A lot of you following this year's CES proceedings may have seen keynote by Comcast's CEO Brian Roberts which was followed by a segment by Jemaine & Bret from Flight of the Conchords. For those who missed it, here is the video of the skit.

Well, the guys were kind enough to donate their 'prototype' duly autographed to us at CIM. So here is a quick photo before it gets taken away by the technology department ;).

For those who haven't yet gotten into the show, I would strongly recommend it. And you can use our very own Fancast to find out when and how you can watch it.

The last few weeks the Fan development team has been working pretty hard towards the next release of the video player. The new release revisits some of the UI of the application. We hope the changes make it easier to discover other videos from the Fan's library of over 100,000 videos. While the build is still currently in development/bug-fix mode, we figured it would be cool to give a sneak peek of whats coming down the line. So here is the first look at Fan 4.2:

View image

Comcast High Speed Internet service users can preview the application here.

A lot of the design changes have come from user feedback on the Fan forum which the team has monitored closely as well as other user studies performed by the Information Architecture group here.

One of the biggest changes has been the introduction of the "My Playlist" tab in the playlist area next to the video player. Currently, the Fan is always launched with a default set of videos from the Comcast.net site. However, the list is completely customizable by the user: Users can delete videos from the list by clicking on the x icon at the right corner of each list item, add new videos from the tabbed browse area under the player and drag videos to arrange the list in any order they wish. However, the current design didn't announce those features as well. The explicit naming of the two lists will hopfully get users to create a video experience that works best for them.

Another change in the browse view is bigger thumbnails and paged navigation in the tabbed content browse region. We have also reduced the size of the +Playlist button that adds the video to the end of the user's "My Playlist" rather than play it immediately since most users expected the instant play when the clicked on a list item there. So basically we have maximized the area for the default action. The two arrows on either side of the content browser will allow you to browse through the initial set of videos per category.

We've also added a little bit of eye candy that makes the user experience a little smoother. When paging through the navigator at the bottom of the screen, the thumbnails smoothly slide in. Rollover states are now soft transitions instead of instant color changes, and thumbnails get an animated "play" icon when mousing over them.

Hopefully the new features as well as the design tweaks to the user interface will make the video experience a lot better. Feedback on these new features is welcome.