the stream (mms) of the project presentation day of my uni (all computer science and media students present their projects) is online.
presentation (pdf, in english)

i wanted to use the hotkeys plugin to catch the keyboard events to use it for yourtubemix’s crossfader. it actually turned out that this isn’t necessary since the slider component of jquery ui supports already the typical keys, as richard d. worth explained me:

The design of the slider is to react to the following keypresses while the slider handle is active (by click or tab focus): UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, HOME, END. Whether horizontal or vertical orientation, UP and RIGHT will always increase the value by one step. DOWN and LEFT will always decrease it by one step. HOME will jump to the min, END will jump to the max. …

so i decided to make a quick overview graphic and to share it with you:

Learn more at the jQuery UI Development & Planning Wiki: Slider

… if you like the project!

i got some great feedback last night at the media night (university event where the students present their projects to the public).
below i’ll list some stuff which i am going to work on during the next days (if i can find some time between learning for my last exams at uni):

• control crossfader with the arrow keys (left & right to just move the crossfader a bit, up & down to move the fader to the edges)
• i talked to siegbert müller about what i could do to get search engines‘ attention
• last night many people asked me about playlists. i am definitely going to implement this one day but this will take a little while (sorry!)
• being more web 2.0: showing stuff like what other users are watching right now, what the most favorite songs are, and so on
• showing the title and duration of the search results more intuitive

wanna talk to me about yourtubemix.com, further features or just let me know what you love about it or what you hate about it: just let me know!

will take place at my university (room 304) next Thursday, January 28th.
i will present yourtubemix.com at 16:05.
there will probably be a live stream, too. so everyone will get the chance to see all those projects which we students worked on for the last months.

UPDATE
you can get my presentation (pdf) here.

I just added YourTubeMix.com to Google’s “YouTube Project Gallery”

This way to rate and comment it.

i used the swf object over at YourTubeMix. next time i will take a look at jquery’s new plugin: jQuery SWFObject Plugin .

i finished my university project “YourTubeMix.com – The Crossfader for YouTube”!

it’s available to all my readers under this url: http://yourtubemix.com/index1.html

it will be open to public on wednesday 28th of January (the day of my project presentation at my uni).

feedback is much appreciated – i will try to give my best although i won’t have too much free time during the next weeks.

youtube released video annotations in june 2008. i guess it brings a huge usability advantage for disabled people and also brings some meaning (in multiple languages, which is cool!) to the videos but i don’t like them yet.

why? because i can’t turn them off by default.
why would i like to turn them off? because actually only a few people use it in a appropriate way, all the others are just bothering youtubers with advertising or crap within their annotations, here an example:

you can’t even see this video because it’s flooded by useless annotations which don’t bring any advantage to the user watching this video:

But i have to say there are some good / entertaining examples, too:

• interactive card trick
• hug the world
• interactive shell game
• tube adventures

Here’s a video which shows you how to use annotations.

Use this page to explore the YouTube Data API.

sprites are no new kids around the block. but they are still worth to mention because they are very efficient in decreasing the HTTP GETs.
e.g. instead of loading two images for two states of one button, just use one image and swap it with the sprites technique.

#crossfaderHandler { background: transparent url(../img/regler.png) 0 0 no-repeat; }
#crossfaderHandler:hover { background: transparent url(../img/regler.png) -70px 0 no-repeat; }


i was looking for a nice way using intervals / timers in my project. i am quite happy about finding a jQuery Plugin called “jQuery Timers” by a guy called Blair Mitchelmore (Blog), since nearly the whole project is based on YouTube APIs and jQuery anyway.

the plugin is licensed under the WTFPL – Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License, which i never heard of before.

jQuery Plugin Page
Project Homepage

a big role in the project plays the ui.jquery library. wanna know what’s all about jQuery and ui.jQuery? i read an informative post in the ui newsgroup.

yesterday youtube launched their application gallery, a place where everyone can promote their youtube based application or comment on others’ projects.

the youtube pages got expanded to 960px width to give more space for bigger videos. it looks a bit odd on old 4:3 videos but i guess soon lots of the videos will be in better quality and the black border will disappear. at the moment some users are pretty upset about it, but i am sure those things will be fixed sooner or later. anyway, i welcome that change.

i have been working with youtube’s chromeless player for a few weeks now.
first i thought i might just use one of the players build upon it (e.g. jw flv player) to save some time learning the whole chromeless player and js player API. but since there always are problems using a component build on another (e.g. no multiple videos on one page, or simply user interface issues which take longer to fix than actually doing it directly with the chromeless player) i decided to go the long way.
so now i am struggling with some stuff and luckily i just found “Ext JS Ext.ux.YoutubePlayer“, an open source player build upon the chromeless player. so i am going to have a look at the code, maybe i will get some hints on how to do it.

the AJAX Libraries API (blog post) takes away the pain of managing your JavaScript libraries. the list will get updated with the latest versions of the APIs as well as additional APIs.

i am currently using it in my project (a youtube mashup… soon more about that) for loading the SWF Object as well as jQuery and jQuery UI.

it doesn’t only save you time developing, also the loading process for the end user should decrease.

i am currently working on a project using vairous youtube APIs. i am kind of a youtube power user and always very interested in other projects.
i read about streamdrag at dr web (german article) . it’s a online tool for creating youtube playlists, which will get lost after leaving their site. it focuses on music videos and doesn’t display the videos, only the sound. i’s developed by this german company: vaib
very interesting and a little bit similar to my project. more about this as soon as it reaches a viewable status.

Crossfader: tick

If you want to use .getPlayerState() on your YouTube Embedded or Chromeless Player you will get one of those States:

(don’t worry about the italic stuff, this is just a note for myself)

player.getPlayerState():Number
Returns the state of the player. Possible values are unstarted (-1), ended (0), playing (1), paused (2), buffering (3), video cued (5).

as mentioned: i am currently working on a uni project using the youtube api.

The JW FLW Media Player by Jeroen Wijering is probably the most used FLV player. it is nicely done, you can control quite a lot and there are even plugins and skins and stuff available to use.

but one thing bothers me about the latest version (v.4.2) of JW player:

this problem was raised already a few times in the player’s forum and it seems like it is going to be fixed in the next version (v.4.3).

workaround
i read that previous versions (e.g. v.3.6) were able to play multiple videos. i am going to try this one now.

YouTube’s Halloween special logo:

Talking about YouTube: Today i had my Project’s “Kick Off Meeting” with Björn and Mr. Kretzschmar. i will talk about this sooner or later.