You know, there’s not much that beats the feeling of sharing a pile of comic books on a Saturday afternoon with a friend, whiling away the hours adventuring with that silly Weebl, cruising through space with Blambot or just laughing at page after page of Penny Arcade. That is, IF any of these comics actually existed, which they don’t. Kinda. Not in a paper sense, anyway.

While I may spend time reading a comic book, er, graphic novel,  getting ink stains from the pages on my fingers, I also have a group of sites I frequent for fun and information. It was in the spirit of sharing the information in a cool way that I hit upon today’s little video toy.

It contains the images for 7 websites I like to visit and two of those ad-type images thrown in just for the heck of it. Now, images are all well and good, but you’re not getting ANYWHERE without knowing the names of the sites, right? That’s where Keynote comes in. As a part of the QuickTime export, Keynote can embed URL hyperlinks right in the video. So, as you click “Next 3” to progress your way through all the selections, if you find one that looks interesting, click on it and you’ll be taken to that web page.

Two more technical points that need to be mentioned for the “But I tried that and it didn’t work that way!” crowd. As always, due to limitations in iWeb, I’ve had to tweak the video so that it’s happy within an iWeb page. First, iWeb doesn’t let you set the movie to begin playing as soon as the page is loaded. I fixed that by adding an AutoPlay sprite right at the beginning of the movie that takes precedence over the html settings. That way, I can start with a black frame and fade in nicely. The other point has to do with what happens when you get to the end of the movie. With the QuickTime export from Keynote, it leaves an extra click at the end of every video such that a user clicking on “Next 3” would watch the image fade to black..... and then nothing. The user would have to click AGAIN to be returned to the beginning of the video. In comes the loopsprite movie. Placed at the end of the video, when the playhead hits this sprite, it’s automatically sent back to the first frame of the video where, as you’ll remember, I have an AutoPlay sprite sitting there waiting for it to continue on through the first set of website choices.

I’m quite happy with the way it turned out. Because I’m pushing myself to actually do 5 video related blogs this week, I’m going to get the source information “download ready” and post it all at the end of the week, so don’t dismay, I will be back to including something fun on every other post or so soon!