Streamus turns YouTube into the music player you always wanted
1–10 of 12 posts
Re: Streamus turns YouTube into the music player you always wanted
#2Man, I showed you guys this days before Reddit and nobody gave a damn, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8896228.
Ah well, author here. Feel free to ask questions as you see fit. I'll re-iterate what I had said in my other post:
Streamus has been my personal project for almost three years. I had become frustrated with managing music hosted on YouTube and decided to streamline the process.
The client is written with Backbone/Marionette and is backed by a C# server. The entire project is open-source:
- https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension/
- https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusServer
Streamus enjoys ~150K weekly users and continues to grow after recently updating the UI with a design inspired by Google's Material Design principles. Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/vyd56
I have no concrete plans to monetize; Streamus is mostly serving as an invaluable learning experience. I went into this with very little knowledge of JavaScript, design, and development workflow. Pushing myself to better the product has forced me to markedly improve in all aspects.
I'd love to have feedback, critique, or possibly find other developers interested in implementing some features. :)
Re: Streamus turns YouTube into the music player you always wanted
#3Man, I showed you guys this days before Reddit and nobody gave a damn, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8896228 . Ah well, author here. Feel free to ask questions as you see fit. I'll re-iterate what I had said in my other post: Streamus has been my personal project for almost three years. I had become frustrated with managing music hosted on YouTube and decided to streamline the process. The client is written wi…
Do you use a library for Material Design theme?
Any books or tutorials that you considered very helpful to tackle the UI side of the development? (front-end, chrome extension, etc)
Re: Streamus turns YouTube into the music player you always wanted
#4Man, I showed you guys this days before Reddit and nobody gave a damn, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8896228 . Ah well, author here. Feel free to ask questions as you see fit. I'll re-iterate what I had said in my other post: Streamus has been my personal project for almost three years. I had become frustrated with managing music hosted on YouTube and decided to streamline the process. The client is written wi…
Do you use a library for Material Design theme? Any books or tutorials that you considered very helpful to tackle the UI side of the development? (front-end, chrome extension, etc)
Nope! No library for material design. I wrote all my CSS from scratch and have never done any major UI development before this. It was a huge learning experience for me!
Seriously, I used to really suck at UI: http://imgur.com/a/CH2T2
The most challenging aspect of designing a browser extension is that you really get the raw end of both worlds. It's not a mobile device. No thumbs at the bottom of the screen, no swiping, etc. However, it's not a website, either, so not a lot of screen real-estate to work with.
References included:
- http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introducti... (99% of ideas from here)
- https://www.polymer-project.org/components/paper-elements/de...
- http://fezvrasta.github.io/bootstrap-material-design/
- https://dribbble.com/shots/1795733-Spotify-Material-Design-C...
The icon set I used can be found on GitHub, provided by Google: http://google.github.io/material-design-icons/
I did some custom modifications to the icons to size them properly for my extension using InkScape, https://inkscape.org/en/, and the PixelSnap plugin, https://code.google.com/p/pixelsnap/
Re: Streamus turns YouTube into the music player you always wanted
#5Man, I showed you guys this days before Reddit and nobody gave a damn, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8896228 . Ah well, author here. Feel free to ask questions as you see fit. I'll re-iterate what I had said in my other post: Streamus has been my personal project for almost three years. I had become frustrated with managing music hosted on YouTube and decided to streamline the process. The client is written wi…
I haven't even tried the thing itself, but your website already turned me off. Now, i realize you most likely didn't realize this yourself, since Opera ASA intentionally seeded a lot of confusion and fucked over their original userbase, but please:
When you say "Opera", make it clear that you mean "Opera 15+", since Opera 15 and upwards are completely different software packages than Opera 12, share no code whatsoever, and are in fact just Chromium clones with some amount of reskinning and less than 1% of the original features of Opera 12 added.
Re: Streamus turns YouTube into the music player you always wanted
#6Man, I showed you guys this days before Reddit and nobody gave a damn, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8896228 . Ah well, author here. Feel free to ask questions as you see fit. I'll re-iterate what I had said in my other post: Streamus has been my personal project for almost three years. I had become frustrated with managing music hosted on YouTube and decided to streamline the process. The client is written wi…
I haven't even tried the thing itself, but your website already turned me off. Now, i realize you most likely didn't realize this yourself, since Opera ASA intentionally seeded a lot of confusion and fucked over their original userbase, but please: When you say "Opera", make it clear that you mean "Opera 15+", since Opera 15 and upwards are completely different software packages than Opera 12, share no code whatsoeve…
I'm aware that Opera wasn't running on the Webkit browser before... but they shifted to WebKit several years ago. How many years have to pass before you'd find it acceptable to start assuming new software is for the new stuff?
The website's meh. It was quickly bootstrapped, but I'd rather focus on delivering a quality product than quality marketing. There's only so many hours in each day and many of the installs come from the Chrome Web Store itself rather than through my landing page.
Re: Streamus turns YouTube into the music player you always wanted
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't even tried the thing itself, but your website already turned me off. Now, i realize you most likely didn't realize this yourself, since Opera ASA intentionally seeded a lot of confusion and fucked over their original userbase, but please: When you say "Opera", make it clear that you mean "Opera 15+", since Opera 15 and upwards are completely different software packages than Opera 12, share no code whatsoeve…
I'm aware that Opera wasn't running on the Webkit browser before... but they shifted to WebKit several years ago. How many years have to pass before you'd find it acceptable to start assuming new software is for the new stuff? The website's meh. It was quickly bootstrapped, but I'd rather focus on delivering a quality product than quality marketing. There's only so many hours in each day and many of the installs come…
> How many years have to pass before you'd find it acceptable to start assuming new software is for the new stuff?
It's not about the time passed, it's entirely about the usability. They didn't shift to webkit. They didn't just change the engine. They threw away literally all they had, fired most of their development staff, took a stock chromium, and started building new stuff on top of that, at a glacial pace.
So far they've managed to add only an utter miniscule amount of the hundreds of features found in 12, and from what they've communicated, much will never make it into the new codebase because they don't care, or because the features are impossible to implement in Chromium.
> How many years have to pass before you'd find it acceptable to start assuming new software is for the new stuff?
I wasn't asking for an overhaul, only for 4 added characters: " 15+" English isn't my primary language, so: Was i unclear about that?
And lastly, some feedback on the plugin itself: It's quite nice, and i like the quality of life thing of having it available from any page. However as far as i can tell there's no way to add existing youtube playlists to it wholesale, and if i have to add every video manually, i'd rather stick to bare youtube. Did i overlook something?
Re: Streamus turns YouTube into the music player you always wanted
#8Sean,
Streamus is fantastic. Great job. I've been looking for something like this. I'm building a couple of Chrome extensions, any tips would be appreciated.
Re: Streamus turns YouTube into the music player you always wanted
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you use a library for Material Design theme? Any books or tutorials that you considered very helpful to tackle the UI side of the development? (front-end, chrome extension, etc)
Nope! No library for material design. I wrote all my CSS from scratch and have never done any major UI development before this. It was a huge learning experience for me! Seriously, I used to really suck at UI: http://imgur.com/a/CH2T2 The most challenging aspect of designing a browser extension is that you really get the raw end of both worlds. It's not a mobile device. No thumbs at the bottom of the screen, no swipi…
Hey Sean, Awesome work + learning experience. Thank you very much for sharing.
By the way, your v1 screenshot looks like you have some experience in HTML/CSS/JS.
I'm literally a big zero when it comes to UI. I know JS/HTML and can hack my way around CSS but most of the time these kind of works are not from scratch.
Re: Streamus turns YouTube into the music player you always wanted
#10Sean, Streamus is fantastic. Great job. I've been looking for something like this. I'm building a couple of Chrome extensions, any tips would be appreciated.
Hummm,
Could you be more specific? I know pretty much everything there is to know on extensions (or I'd like to think I do...), but there's so much to them!
What're your goals with them? What do they do?