Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
I’m in the middle of creating a new YouTube gadget and part of the specification is that it allows the user to see the videos on a time-line. The idea behind it is that companies can then have a simple and sleek gadget that allows them to display their videos, whether they’re viral or community influenced (much like Sprite’s Green Eyed World), in a simple time-line sort of format.
So using the MVC code I created for my other gadgets I was able to easily adapt it, create a new 2D carousel and then was left with the task of creating the visual time-line control and also sorting the videos by their date. Now the YouTube GData API allows you to pass a parameter called “orderby” with the value “published” which returns the entries according to when they were uploaded, the latest first.
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Tags: Actionscript 3, api, APIs, brand, carousel, feed, gadget, gadgets, gdata, google, playlist, playlists, search, videos, you, youtube
Posted in APIs, Actionscript 3, Development, XML |
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Thursday, May 14th, 2009
I recently re-found (if that’s a word?) widgetbox.com where developers can upload widget’s they’ve created and share them with the community. Now a lot of my work at Google and YouTube has been centered around developing gadgets and widgets using the Google Gadgets API.
So I’ve taken it upon myself to make sure that I publish all the gadgets I create on there that I’m happy for people to use. One of the first gadgets I created as a little test to see how to use the YouTube API. It’s a simple gadget that reads a feed from Last.fm and then gets YouTube videos. You’re able to put in your Last.fm username and it will get your favourite tracks/artists/albums and then query YouTube for the popular videos. It’s a great way to find new music!
If you’re interested here’s the iGoogle Gadget link and here’s the widgetbox.com link.
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Tags: Actionscript 2, Actionscript 3, fm, gadget, gadgets, igoogle, last, lastfm, tube, widget, widgetbox, you, youtube
Posted in APIs, Actionscript 2, Actionscript 3, Design, Development, Flash, XML |
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Monday, May 11th, 2009
Recently while working at Google I’ve been asked to built some YouTube products, essentially brand channel gadgets built on the Google Gadgets API. YouTube has two main gadgets that they sell:
- YouTube Full-width Carousel
This is a simple carousel that allows the user to shuffle through some YouTube videos. It can work with both the GData API (so playlists, search and so on) and the YouTube Contest API (it’s a “closed” format at the moment, so information is only available on a “need to know” basis). It’s not the prettiest thing and there are a few things I don’t really like about it. But it works and that’s the main thing. You can see an example on the YouTube Live Channel.
- YouTube Full-width and Normal-width Contest
YouTube contests are a great way to engage the YouTube and web community. They provide a simple interface and API that allows you to register votes and views for certain videos. Good examples of this are the Davos Debates, Sprite’s Green Eyed World (although the developers missed a tricked and used Facebook comments rather than YouTube’s). You’ll notice that both the contest examples have custom gadgets rather than YouTube’s product. A good use of YouTube’s contest gadget would be the recent Barclaycard Create compeition. It’s a nice format, but again, the aesthetics of the template let it down and a lot can be done to improve and make it look and work much better.
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Tags: actionscript, Actionscript 2, Actionscript 3, api, APIs, carousel, contest, Flash, gadgets, gdata, google, papervision, pv3d, youtube
Posted in APIs, Actionscript 3, Design, Development, Flash |
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