So, a client/manager comes to you and says, “I need a custom video player, with these features:”

• built in Flash
• basic play/pause and stop controls
• a timeline/playhead that can scrub back and forth
• a download progress bar
• mute and volume slider
• plays a list of videos described in an XML file
• must be able to go fullScreen
• display time played and time remaining in the video
• I want the videos to have rounded corners
• It would be nice if the video had a reflection below it
• I want all of the basic controls to fade out when the user stops moving the mouse and fade back in when the mouse moves
• I only want one player but I want to be able to tell it which XML file to load dynamically
• I also want to be able to start playing a video other than the first in the XML list

You’re thinking this is going to be a pretty big project and then they ask for two more things

• Oh, and it must display captions as the video plays
• And it has to be able to stream videos from youTube

After all of this you feel one of two things.

1. You’re thinking you’ll be working some long nights for a while
2. You’re thinking your client/manager thinks this is going to take weeks to implement when you know that it will only take a few hours, at best. So you’ll be able to kick back for a while.

The difference between these two designers: The first one hasn’t used video.Maru.