Came here just to say this. Pleasantly surprised to see front-end project without a package.json, a bundler, a UI library. Even the templating is inline!
The template being inline is a bug, not a feature in my opinion. You can actually write arbitrary templates into HTML using <script type='text/template'> (or really any type other than 'javascript'), and with a simple function get ~90% of the power of template strings in languages such as ES6 or Python. Writing your templates into JS like that is plain ugly and unmaintainable.
I agree writing templates into JS like that is plain ugly.
Using HTML5 template[1] tag is a better way to go. I used it in a fun project[2] and it works flawlessly in all modern browsers
I want something like this on the youtube dashboard. I want to see at a glance the trends + subscriptions (and the subscriptions that are gaining momentum/are popular). I don't want "recommendations" from youtube mixed in with my regular feed. I cross them out and tell youtube that I'm not interested in them and it just ignores that and shows them up again anyway. Subscription list tends to "fade away". Older subscriptions are forgotten and don't show up and only the new ones do.
Better organization of the playlists and a feature to search across my account for playlist and the videos in them would be another amazingly important feature that I want.
Went on a rant there. But I love youtube, except the interface is such a huge turn off that it's quite annoying. I've been meaning to make an alternative UI for it. It's been on the back-burner in my ideas.txt for quite a while. So I just brain-dumped the most immediate complaints I had.
Really dislike how titles are truncated after a fairly small number of words. (I did a search for "on cinema" which is a comedy web series, and almost none of the results showed a full title.) There seems to be no reason not to simply let the titles wrap. Who cares if some result boxes are bigger than others? Anyway, a potentially useful tool if this is corrected.
I've deleted my YouTube account and started using RSS to subscribe to channels. If I could get it to open to this page instead I think I'd have just about the exact experience I'd like. The only change I'd like to see is to have the video fill the page (not full screen or "theater mode") and have absolutely nothing else on there.
Allow me to go to your page just by entering a different domain, meaning having a URL schema similar to that of youtube, that would make things much simpler.
Clean interface but it made me (re)discover that the related videos are really useful. When a video is over here is like "what now?" and I have to go back to the search page. It wastes times. However I understood the spirit of the experiment. It's just that YouTube with an adblocker and NoScript is not that bad.
I'm torn on this. On one hand it's useful to have related videos, on the other I find that it often leads to distractions. Maybe the latter is because recommended videos on youtube is both related videos and "videos you might like" (which means that researching a topic turns into watching standup comedy I like or similar)
Essential YouTube is an experiment to improve user experience by stripping the redundant away and focusing on the essentials.
Features:
Disruption-free Search
The video keeps playing even while you are searching.
Instant Search
See the results as you are typing.
Queuing
Queue videos as you like to watch them consecutively.
Looping
Loop a video forever.
Hassle-free
Video annotations are disabled by default. Also, no Autoplay, but the videos you want to play.
Client-side
There are no servers in-between you and YouTube; everything is done on your computer and it's open source. As private as it could be.
Obvious it might sound, but please keep in mind that Essential YouTube is an experiment, and as pleasing as it might be to use, it's not intended to be a replacement for everyday use. Missing functionality is not a bug, it's a feature.
"Features: Disruption-free Search The video keeps playing even while you are searching"
When I do a search, the audio of the video keeps playing, and there is a working seek bar at the top, but the video itself vanishes. Not sure if this is intentional, but I assume not based on the description (Firefox 47 on OS X).
Ah it is! Sorry if the description itself is misleading, but I thought it would be nice to be able to listen, while skimming over search results, so I decided to hid the video during searching.
Maybe I could do something like in YouTube's iOS wpp where video goes to down-right corner, but I thought I would keep it simple.
Nice. I built a very basic 'clean youtube' player a long time back for personal purposes, that enabled me to just have a floating window of the video playing.
Can you make playlists? I'm not even thinking of having an account and storing them there, but just to have a long URL that lists a bunch of videos to be played.
Oh my god. Even in this app's broken, buggy, unfinished state, it is already better than the official youtube app in some respects. Given the fact that I tend to use subscriptions a lot, this doesn't really work for me yet though...
Google's youtube group has long been the source of much fsckery. They really don't seem to understand that every time they mess with the site, people's livelihoods are on the line. Subscription is now more as suggestion to the algorithm than a command? A couple thousand people just got screwed. Channels like ChannelAwesome and others get their monetization disabled for weeks with no explanation? Doug Walker, and a host of others, just lost a good chunk of income. And most recently, The Purge has just knocked thousands of channels back hundreds of thousands of subs, with many people unsubbed for no goddamn reason, with barely a comment from youtube HQ. Do they even care anymore?
And if they can't keep the core of their service working, is it any wonder that they screw up an app that they probably aren't focusing that many resources on?
Agree the Android app is terrible. For example, notifications are unreliable and it's not even possible to read the comment you're replying to while you type. It's odd, considering the app comes from the same company that built Android and basically makes software for a "living".
I became aware of it after setting up the website, unfortunately. I hope I won't have to change the domain and the name.
Another violation, that I became aware of later on too, is hiding the player during searching. According to the ToS section "Prohibitions" entry 14, the player must be bigger than or equal to the minimum video player size, which is 200x200 pixels.
> It leverages the official API so I don't see why not.
There is something called Terms Of Service. Just because you use an API it doesn't mean you can do anything with it. It's important to read them, because they can get you into legal troubles if you don't comply with these terms.
You should be really careful with this "YOLO" mindset, especially if you are a professional developer.
Their API has a TOS. Not everything that uses the API is allowed by the TOS, and you shouldn't assume that it is. Not saying this site is against the TOS (I haven't read it), but something to keep in mind.
[1] https://github.com/boramalper/Essential-YouTube/blob/master/...