Posted by Dan on May 4, 2009 in
Reviews,
youtube So I noticed a shiny new feature the other day on YouTube, the ability to pop out the video or to “Watch this video in new window” on certain videos.
Now so far the only video I have come across using this feature is a 1:05:37 long talk from Vint Cerf and amazingly, I have yet to find a bug… and there’s only 1 improvement i would like to see at the moment.
So on videos using the feature you see a little TV shaped square with an arrow pointing into the top right corner right next to the Turn Down the Lights button.
When you click this it pauses the video on the main page and loads the video in the pop-up as you can see below.
This seems to work pretty well and is a nice little idea, but it can be taken further, now i have been watching this hour long talk and i want to watch the video in a new window after 20 minutes and the pop-up opens and starts playing from the beginning, which isn’t a massive deal but it would be a lot easier if it resumed from where you were watching, like BBC iPlayer can.
Tags: google, vint cerf, youtube
Posted by Dan on Feb 1, 2009 in
General stuff Admittedly i am a little late posting this, all the hard core bloggers got this out on the day.
So yesturday someone at google made a “human error”…
Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.
Okay i will explain a little, most people at some point or another when searching google came across a site which said this site is harmful and on click you are shown a google page telling you the following site may contain malware, well google works with StopBadware.org to keep this list of “badware” sites, but someone messed up when they were changing the location of said list and ended up with every site being marked as bad.
I wont go into masses of detail because I’m sure there are already a lot of blogs which have done the same, including the Google Blog i will stick some pingbacks and links to some good posts about it below…
Now i have a sort of mixed view on this, on one hand i think, hehe this is great it shows humans still work at google and it isn’t perfect, on the other i think… this is google for god sakes! how could this happen?! Although i am sure while it hasn’t been done publicly I’m sure the “human error” would have had a good telling off…
Tags: google, mess up, security
Posted by Dan on Jan 20, 2009 in
General stuff 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 
Tags: google
Posted by Dan on Jan 19, 2009 in
Ranting Okay, I’m not happy.
I was. Now I’m not.
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?
Tags: censor, google, youtube
Posted by Dan on Jan 17, 2009 in
Ranting,
Reviews,
youtube 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!).
- Plugin used: http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ -
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!
Tags: google, mess up, youtube