Okay, so i thought i would start something on my blog, quite simple just to talk a little about my favourite song of the week, i love my music, and listen to radio alot so i have a lot of favourites!
So this weeks i think it has to be Lily Allen’s The Fear, for me its classic Lily with a good beat and interesting lyrics.
The video itself reminds me a little of a couple of other female artisits, one being Kate Nash (which i also love) and Gwen Stafani because of the style of the video and music.
I am only now realising how crap I am at describing music, o well, important thing is i like it so watch it on youtube and buy it on amazon! (please).
So previously i made a post about YouTubes’ “Turn Down The Lights” feature, which when it was first online was very… very… very poor, now however i have noticed that the nerds at YouTube have obviously pulled their fingers out and got it sorted so it (almost) works as intended in all browsers.
Now lets get the “almost” out the way…
Yes they have still left the button position all messed up!! (if you take a look at the previous post I even demonstrated how this can be fixed!)
But alas, no it’s close but the no smoking ban means its no cigar.
I do want to post a few screenshots of how they have improved the feature and do a little comparison too.
So originally the page displayed like this when YouTubes’ “Turn Down The Lights” feature was activated.
As you can see the gradient looks crap… and there is the random floating “promoted videos” title, which as you can see below is still floating randomly in the background.
So they seem to have sorted the background fade which now looks much better, they have also fixed the problem with the pop over message when you hover the button so it doesn’t mess up the background gradient after you have hovered over it.
Overall i think they have made some good improvements to how the feature works and looks in IE7, although there are still some basic things which need sorting, like the floating “Promoted Videos” title, and the alignment of the button and video title, both of which are pretty basic and can be sorted with a little time and a skilled programmer; which YouTube has.
So come on YouTube get this together! Nice idea. Poor execution.
Okay, so as you can see my last post was a rather poorly worded rant because my post about YouTube turn down the lights feature was totally removed from google. But now its back… and its 3rd position!!
So yay… Thanks Google… still would like to know why it totally vanished for a day :s
Will hopefully be making video tomorrow for 5awg so watch it
Google has removed ALL traces of my last post from their results, which is rather annoying as it was ranking nice and high for some good words, i was on the first page for the phrase “YouTube turn down the lights feature”, second page for “YouTube turn down the lights” and on both the 3rd result was a forum which was linking and discussing my post.
And now. Nothing.
Google why have you censored me?
Can anyone provide any kind of explanation as to why a page would be in google one day and totally removed the next? Even when i search dansgalaxy.co.uk for the term YouTube it shows every page with a faint mention but not a page i say YouTube about 30 times.
Have they really stooped as low as removing pages which state the facts about the poor quality features which YouTube (their child company) is churning out?
I was just catching up on my YouTube subscriptions and stumbled across yet another, under tested (assuming it has undergone ANY testing) “feature”.
“Turn down the lights”
This only seems to show on the long videos, i noticed it on a 50 minute ofcom talk (don’t ask why, but i like to keep up with the media and communications sector).
I have to say, this seems to be the best example of simply little to no testing being done before things go live, and frankly it is totally unacceptable of a company/website like YouTube/Google.
YouTube and Google literally have hundreds and thousands of developers (its rumored it costs $1 MILLION a day just to feed them), and they are FAILING to produce decent features.
Okay so first off lets show how this looks on the page.
Exhibit A clearly shows the YouTube coders need to learn how to code.
Because the “Turn the lights down” button has bumped up the title of the video, leaving a lot of wasted white space around the top area. This is BASIC coding, and YouTube should not have this problem. End OF!
(You can also see the language selection box “feature” which STILL won’t leave me in peace and insists that it must know – Do i want to view the site in English or English.)
Also before any of the people who know I generally prefer to use IE7, this isn’t just IE… its FireFox too – not browser issue, it’s YouTube.
Just to prove my point slightly, i even went to the trouble of proving it can be done better.
Within 5 minutes (including the time it took to download and install the editor plugin) I had hacked about a bit and got them looking better. Obviously it can be done better. But it shouldn’t be done by me (at least not until I’m on the payroll!).
Of course, i do seem to rant about YouTube and their handy little “features” and changes, but this ones really got me, and it gets worse.
So when you click the “Turn down the lights” button to adds a kind of lightbox effect to the area around the video and hides the sidebar and other boxes next to and below the video itself. (Note the fact that the “Promoted Videos” title is left floating mid-screen)
As you can see it seems YouTube tried to get fancy and be different by not just making the background fade but by adding gradient to the fade, so the top left hand corner is much darker and fades off into the bottom right, however frankly this looks crap, and a normal lightbox style would be much better.
Also why couldn’t they have some nice JS “move” the video into the center of the screen, and maybe enlarge it? I assume the idea of putting it only on long videos is they expect users to watch them, and want to make it easier and less distracting? Well surely a centered slightly enlarged version is much better than just hiding the sidebar which now leaves a HUGE empty void above and below the video!
You guessed it! It GETS WORSE!
Not only this but now when you hover over the “Turn up the lights” icon it totally destroys the gradient around the area of the pop-up.
And leaves it looking like like someone cut a chunk out the gradient and then refilled it with another gradient.
This kind of thing just really bugs the hell out of me, its terrible, its buggy, its crap, pointless, pathetic attempts and showing off what they can do and they have failed.
Maybe the credit crunch is to blame, everyone else is blaming everything on the “economic climate”… maybe Google/YouTube had to give the entire debugging team the sack as they running a little short on cash? After all a majority of Googles money comes from ads…
The worst part is you just know that this kind of thing would have been picked up in minutes if the people who developed this went to Bob in the next office and said mind taking a look at what i just done?
YouTube, you fail.
BETA TESTING IS WHAT YOU NEED! I will keep saying it until you start listening!
So originally the page displayed like this when YouTubes’ “Turn Down The Lights” feature was activated.
looks much better, they have also fixed the problem with the pop over message when you hover the button so it doesn’t mess up the background gradient after you have hovered over it.
