Lisa Forgan's Blog

JW Player
I've been using the JW Player for over 5 years. It has been the best solution for a video player skin. When JW Player first came out, it was a sweet simple tool to style your player. As it has grown over the years, it has become a bigger and grander tool. It has a little more functionality and is even more simple to use.

The best thing about this video skin, is that it has a big community behind it. That means, they are always improving it, there are always people to help you find the solution to your problems, they are staying up with today's coding technique (yes, html 5 too) and it is cross-browser/device compatible. It is easy to customize so it fits into your website's layout and design. The JW Player also can have a video library or not. It can play many formats. View the specs here. Skin it. Script it. Embed it anywhere. Play it on your iPhone or iPad, too. Visit the JW Player Website.

You can use the JW Player Wizard to help you achieve the look and feel you want. It will also generate the javascript code. Go to the Wizard.

To use this it is simple and should only take a few minutes to set up.

• Step 1 : Define what video you want it to be / and its format (flv, mp4, etc)
• Step 2 : Put/link swfobject.js in the head.
• Step 3 : Upload your video onto the server
• Step 4 : Paste JavaScript code into the html where you want it to display.
• Step 5 : Customize color, size, etc. to your needs.
• Step 6 : Test

That pretty much sums it up on how it is done.

jQuery
I think with jQuery, I've been using this library for 7 years. It is a quick and simple JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.

The great thing about jQuery is that there is a huge community behind it and it is very cross-browser/device friendly. They consistently are updating/improving code. They also have many people who can help you with troubleshooting and questions.

Some of the possible animations, plugins, or even just simplified JavaScript code you can do are:

• Superfish Menus
• Accordians
• Fades
• Sliders
• PNG Fix
• jParallax
• Animations
• Pretty much anything.

To learn more about jQuery, click here.

To learn about jQuery's mobile devices coding, click here.

There is also a mobile device coding that follows similar to jQuery but has a liquid layout called the CSSGrid.