luis is a co-founder and social software architect at SyndeoLabs, and a director at Exist Global. he likes building small web toys a whole lot. More ...

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    guttervomit

    • 11

      New Web Toy: Infinitube.net

      18 Jul 2008

      A couple of days ago, a friend and I were lamenting my lack of a proper television in my house. (Seeing as I have 3 laptops and a pretty large LCD monitor, it seemed like a  redundant appliance you know?) The more I thought about it though, the more I came to realize that having a TV around was useful just to have something else going on while you’re working. Obviously, when you’re building up momentum you don’t want to be bothered by anything, but for everyday stuff, it’s usually a good idea to have something to look at every now and again just to let your mind breathe.

      I wasn’t of course, about to buy a television to fill this need. I don’t have the space and didn’t really want to add a cable tv bill on top of everything else I have to pay for every month. So, I built a web app instead.

      Infinitube is probably the simplest thing I’ve ever thrown together; all it is is a front-end for the YouTube-G Ruby Gem, coupled with Youtube’s own . I’m running a really barebones Rails application on PostgreSQL, with all of 2 plugins. Took about 8 hours or so from my first wireframe on Illustrator to the final production deploy. (It would have been even quicker if I didn’t have to clean out one of our old servers first so I’d actually have something to put this app on.) I briefly considered putting it on AppSpace, but for something that’s almost 100% personal use, I figured that $30/month was a bit much.

      Still trying to figure out a couple of things, e.g.:

      1) No fullscreen mode yet, which really sucks. You could arguably circumvent this just by using the operating-system zoom on Mac OS X, but you never know when I might need to use the site on a Windows machine. And the fact that I don’t know how to do this yet annoys/challenges me. (Mostly annoys.)

      2) Eventually, I’ll need to add user-registration so we can attach some auto-complete functionality to the query field. That way, your previous keywords show up as you type. (At the moment, keywords are tied to session data, which is a bit fragile, but at least it keeps me from getting my search terms mixed up with anyone else’s.)

      3) I actually lied about the *non-stop* part in “Non-stop Youtube broadcasts.” You’re only ever going to get about 50 videos in one run, unfortunately. (I figure I might as well come out and say that now, before anybody starts complaining.) Because I’m using YouTube-G instead of the full YouTube Ruby wrapper, I lost some flexibility here, in exchange for a big boost in productivity (YTG doesn’t require a developer key and has a one-page README, for instance). I’ll probably shift to the older brother in the near future, but for now, I’ve already getting quite a bit of functionality out of the younger gem.

      4) Keyboard shortcuts would be nice, as it’s a little more convenient than clicking the actual buttons. This one should be really easy to do, although I have to figure out how to isolate the keystrokes from the query field. It’d be super cool to have the number keys mapped to the 10 most recent keywords a user entered; almost like channel-surfing! Super cool!

      Anyway, so yeah. So it’s totally possible to build a halfway-decent, almost bug-free web application in about a full work-day’s time. (Of course, it probably helps if the whole thing is under 800 lines of code, but you know what I mean.)

      11 Responses to “New Web Toy: Infinitube.net”

      1. rockersworld.com » Infinitube Says:
        July 18th, 2008 at 7:12 pm

        [...] is a new web toy built by Luis. He used Ruby on Rails, YouTube-GG Ruby Gem and YouTube’s Javascript API. He made this app in [...]

      2. AJ Says:
        July 19th, 2008 at 12:02 am

        I don’t like it. It’s going to make me addicted to YouTube and I won’t finish anything!

        Good one Luis. Kudos!

        ;)

      3. ia Says:
        July 19th, 2008 at 2:53 am

        You’re unstoppable, Luis! Great job!

      4. sparks Says:
        July 19th, 2008 at 1:04 pm

        now if only i had the uber-fast connection to match…

      5. blozoom! Says:
        July 19th, 2008 at 1:33 pm

        great app. semi nonstop is ok. cant get enough beatles video? use this. BUT this’s only as good as the creator’s ultrashort stickiness to a project. next week, he’s up to something. and we’re all alone doing mano mano youtube clicking, just like the old days.

      6. luis Says:
        July 19th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

        @blozoom — if it makes you feel better, i hop around between projects because it takes awhile for these small ideas to grow out.

        if you think about them like plants, i have to lay lots of individual seeds within a very short period of time and then take care of the ones that show promise. it may look like i’ve some kinda attention-deficit disorder (ok, maybe i have a really mild case), but that’s just because i’m still waiting for more my other plants to take form.

      7. trance_g Says:
        July 22nd, 2008 at 3:52 am

        Genius! Pure genius! Now I have more reason to get a new pair of glasses.

      8. infinitube - reproduzir vídeos do Youtube aleatoriamente no WebTuga Says:
        July 29th, 2008 at 8:19 pm

        [...] ideia do infinitube, um site criado pelo Luis Buenaventura da syndeoLabs é mostrar-lhe uma sucessão de vídeos filtrados por uma ou mais tags sem a [...]

      9. infinitube - reproduzir vídeos do Youtube aleatoriamente no WebTuga Says:
        July 29th, 2008 at 8:19 pm

        [...] ideia do infinitube, um site criado pelo Luis Buenaventura da syndeoLabs é mostrar-lhe uma sucessão de vídeos filtrados por uma ou mais tags sem a [...]

      10. guttervomit » Infinitube Part Deux Says:
        August 9th, 2008 at 9:01 pm

        [...] know what is.) The Second Issue meanwhile was that I still hadn’t addressed one of the really important specs I listed down back when I first launched this thing in mid-July, i.e., having full-screen [...]

      11. TubeParade Says:
        February 26th, 2010 at 2:03 am

        TubeParade,

        Really watch all videos and search for the next ones to put in a playlist
        simultaneous.
        Or just play related movies at random.
        It’s all possible in the TubeParade.com

      Leave a Reply

     

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    Guttervomit v3 went online in January, 2008. It uses Wordpress for publishing, and was built largely with Adobe Illustrator and Textmate. Logotype and navigation is set with Interstate.