Pogue-o-matic

Posted by: Zach Wise    Tags:  ,     Posted date:  November 26, 2008  |  2 Comments

Screenshot of Pogue-o-matic

This wasn’t a typical project for me. It’s a little less serious then projects I usually like to work on, but variety is good. This is also the first project in quite a while in which I worked with green-screen video. The setup for the shoot was sort of a hack, with gaffer taped green sheets on the floor and hanging from the ceiling. Honestly, the green-screen shoot was the easy part of this project.

From: Our New Gadget Blog, the Pogue-o-matic and More
Through the miracle of modern video editing, we’ve created an interactive product finder featuring a wee-size David Pogue who can guide you through the process as you find the right gadget for you. For this version, we’re focusing on cameras, camcorders, smartphones and televisions. As Pogue explains your options and you make your choices, you’ll see what started as a large mess of products turn into a smaller, more manageable group that fits the description you created. You can then get access to more information to make your choice with ease.

Nasty Cookie

The interactive uses a flash cookie of sorts called SharedObject to remember your choices across sessions and even browsers on the same machine. For some flash enthusiasts, this is nothing new. It was new to me. It was also a little problematic. The cookie is hard to clear once it’s been created which caused some problems in beta testing. During the soft-launch we quickly discovered a nasty bug that appears only when a new cookie is created. Since we already had a cookie from testing we never saw the bug. In case you ever use SharedObject, be sure to bookmark this link. It’s the only way to kill the cookie.

Easter Eggs

Remember Easter Eggs? I do. I love ‘em.

Here’s a way to find one of the easter eggs in the Pogue-o-matic.

Enter the Contra code:
↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A ENTER
It’s worth it!

There are a lot more details I can share about this project. Let me know in the comments if you have questions about anything.

About the author
Zach Wise is an award-winning former Senior Multimedia Producer for The New York Times and Associate Professor at Northwestern University.



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  • http://williamcouch.com William Couch

    We use SharedLocalObjects, too, and I can’t say I’m proud of that fact. Flash cookies are ugly, and, yes, like you said, difficult to clear out. They’re also problematic because they don’t get wiped clean when you clear your normal browser cookies. You can dig up the folder on your hard drive where the cookies are stored, and clear out the folder manually – I have it bookmarked in my sidebar in Finder for that very reason. Thankfully, I try to avoid using them at all costs.

    Wish there were a better way to handle cross-session information in Flash…

  • Bob

    Can you tell us a little bit more about the green screen you rigged up? Sounds like a good story and maybe a good tutorial for those of us working on a budget. Did you do it in a studio with lighting, or just the corner of an office cube?