Mozilla launches Popcorn Maker 1.0

Over the weekend, at its Mozilla Festival event in London, the company announced the launch of version 1.0 of Popcorn Maker, its free web application for authoring interactive videos. Described as "a new way to tell stories on the web", Popcorn Maker was developed as part of Mozilla's Webmaker programme, which aims to encourage users around the world to learn about and use "the open building blocks of the web".

Popcorn Maker is written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and powered by the Popcorn.js HTML5 media toolkit and its plugin ecosystem. First announced in November of last year, Popcorn.js is an event framework for HTML5 media that combines HTML and JavaScript and is intended primarily for developers. Using the Butter authoring library, the Cornfield server and other open source projects, Popcorn Maker provides a simplified graphical user interface for Popcorn.js with familiar timeline controls.

Popcorn Maker provides an easy-to-use GUI for Popcorn.js Mozilla says that its Popcorn Maker web app is designed to make it easy for anyone – including students, filmmakers, journalists, artists and bloggers – to create, enhance, remix and share online videos using a simple drag-and-drop interface. These web videos can include interactive content such as real-time social media feeds, maps, news and data visualisations. Media can be imported into Popcorn Maker from sources like YouTube, Vimeo and Soundcloud, as well as from other online HTML5 videos.

Further information about Popcorn Maker 1.0 can be found in a detailed "how it works" post on the Mozilla Hacks developer blog and on the Popcorn Maker homepage, which also includes a tutorial. Source code for Popcorn.js and Butter is hosted on GitHub and made available under the MIT licence.

See also:

• Mozilla launches Webmaker programme, a report from The H.
• Popcorn.js 1.0: Mozilla's new HTML5 media toolkit, a report from The H.

(crve)