If we got to punch one ds106 assignment, I would definitely punch this one.

Before starting this project this afternoon, I went on Twitter and say some of my classmates were having problems with Popcorn. I wasn’t completely sure what the issues were (did they find it difficult to use? did they not understand the assignment?) But after a few minutes, I answered my own questions:

Popcorn just sucked. A lot.

Let me list the reasons why it sucked:

• It didn’t have a user-friendly interface. At first, I thought it was because I didn’t understand the site; but even after watching the interactive tutorial, I knew it was just the stupid site. Whenever I tried to manually type in when to start and end effects, it wouldn’t apply. When I tried to move videos, it would play the video instead of just moving it.  Maybe they need to hire some more programers to fix these dousys?
• It had video playback issues. Oh lordy, lordy, lordy. This was probably one of the BIGGEST problems I encountered during this assignment. When I tried to play the clips, say, around a minute in, Popcorn would decide to play it somewhere else. Oh, and it would just play the original YouTube clip with no effects included. And the fun doesn’t stop there. When I tried to play the entire thing from the beginning, it wouldn’t play. It would just freeze up, and say that the plug-in crashed. Which leads me to my next issue…
• It crashed so many times, I almost cried. And of course, the first three times, I didn’t know I could save it, so I had to start over three different times. It even crashed a couple more times after I tried using it on Mozilla Firefox! WTF! Why would a program crash on its own company’s browser? And it had all the same problems as I encountered on Chrome.

So in general, this entire assignment sucked for me. But I did it. Here’s my remix:

Hopefully it’ll play back for you, because it refused to play for me. The music I found was this really cool remix (so many remixes!)

Also, I hope Alan appreciates a little bit of humour, especially with the picture I chose for what he was going to bring on his lovely adventure. Hehe (:

So, I would love to hear if anyone else had issues with Popcorn. We can have a giant bitch fest and write an awful complaint to Mozilla. I mean, seriously? If you’re going to create something, get all the problems out in the beta form before releasing it to public! Sheesh!