posted by max on August 12, 2008 at 05:20:35 PM

Hello my pretties. It's been a busy few weeks for me, learning Flash and Actionscript has been fairly miserable, but I am chugging along and am ready to give you all a preview of the new YTMND template.

Take a peek at the future after the "break".


Please note this is in its early stages, and the UI and a good portion of the functionality will change, so this would be a good point in time to provide feedback and "constructive" criticism.



I am sure some of you are confused about a lot of the features, so I will go over each briefly, the layout is really up in the air and I am a terrible designer but keep in mind, some of these features are aimed both at seasoned YTMND users and the average passer-by.

The sound control is like any other "movie player"; click toggles muting, mouse-over brings up a volume slider for finite control.

	The YTMND logo will function as a "smart" back button. When a user visits a YTMND from off-site, this button will link back to www.ytmnd.com, when a user visits a YTMND from somewhere on YTMND (e.g. search results, a user's profile, the digest, etc,) clicking the logo will take you back to the page you were previously viewing.
	The question mark makes its return as the button which opens up the "info box", which I might add is currently devoid of organization or design, so don't get too concerned about it yet
	The comments button will give you a direct link to the site's profile/comments section for quick access.
	This button allows the user to do a forced-resynchronization of the sound and image when needed. It is currently a bit finicky, so it stops both sound and image, and then 1 second later starts them from the beginning. The final version will display a status indicator and the restart button will be disabled during the restart phase.
	This button allows you to take advantage of Flash's true full-screen mode, which takes up 100% of the screen real estate and also provides hardware accelerated rendering. Hopefully this will mean the end of GIF synch issues.

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, in addition to the above buttons, this player adds some other major improvements:

• True gapless playback for both WAV and MP3 files, no more Quicktime, no more broken sound, no more compatibility issues.
• Asynchronous asset loading, images and sound files are loaded at the same time.
• No more browser-specific issues, flash works pretty much the same in every browser. Maybe we can get rid of (refresh) for real now.
• Better image placement: at launch the template will allow you to tile, or give a specific area to place the image (e.g. top left, top middle, top right, etc.)

There are still some big concerns for me, which I have yet to research heavily. One of the biggest, is the inability to control your browser while in a Flash app. This means opening new tabs, refreshing, bookmarking, etc. is all broken without using browser menus in some browsers. This probably won't be fixed soon outside of hacks (it's been a "critical" bug in Firefox since 2001.).

There's still a pretty big TODO list for the template, but it is getting there, despite my ever growing hatred for Flash. I think at launch I am going to move the old template rather than replace it, so users will still be able to view YTMNDs in the original template for those of you that fear the various pages and fads that take advantage of the current UI placements.

Anyway, I really need your feedback, design ideas, what you think is important here. Outside of a few very helpful people this has been a fairly lonely project. Also, for those of you who actually know humans in real life and use "social networking", I finally got around to making a YTMND "Facebook page" where you can all gather and do whatever it is people do on "social networking" sites. If any of you want to be an admin and take over organizing it, send me a private message here on YTMND.