YouTube HTML5 Switch v0.1.7 & News

Hello!

Long time no see! I’ve been busy outside the blog-sphere and I’ve got some news to share. First of all, I upgraded my Firefox Add-on to version 0.1.7. So here is the link:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-html5-switch/

All in all, the important addition is that you can now use the hotkey Control+Y instead of pushing the button on the toolbar. Plus, I think it now has no other issues for most new versions of Firefox. I need to point out that I get most of the help from the SDK’s documentation which is great, but, to anyone interested, don’t hesitate to contribute to its content! Restartless add-ons rule!

You may use it and see if it works on YouTube (yeah it works, at least for Firefox 21.0 w/ Fedora Linux) using this video:

Yes! It’s the first video of the band I play with, directed by Kostas Gounaris. Cool huh? ๐Ÿ™‚

I hope you’ll like it as we put a lot of effort to complete it and guess what? There’s also going to be a short film based on the song. I’ll let you know!

Happy new year & YouTube HTML5 Switch v0.1.3

Happy new year everybody!!!

Here I am, once more, to announce the new version of my recent small project YouTube HTML5 Switch. I made quite a few additions to the previous version (for which I already made a post) and changes to it and it’s on its way to become a fully reviewed add-on for Firefox ๐Ÿ™‚

So what the 0.1.3 version does and has right now is:

  • A navigation bar button using the toolbarbutton-jplib (and its depdencies) by erikvold
  • a new 16×16 icon for better cross-platform compatibility (I know, it used to be prettier but I will make it again soon)
  • It works only when “youtube.com/watch” has been opened
  • It doesn’t work if &html5=1 is already in the URL
  • A clickable widget icon at the add-on bar.

What really changed is that now the navigation bar button is movable and its position is maintained if you open a new window etc. More fixes soon ๐Ÿ™‚

Once again, the code is on my github repo. Of course, for any major change I will keep you posted ๐Ÿ™‚

For those and only those who already use YouTube HTML5 Switch and will upgrade to v0.1.3: Don’t worry if the old icon remains on the browser window. Just restart Firefox and everything will work fine!

————————- Ahem…ahem… Your attention pleaseย ๐Ÿ™‚ย  ————————————–

Update: The campaign ended successfully ๐Ÿ™‚

Another project I want to talk about is one that’s on Indiegogo, a crowdfunging website! It’s for my band, Wonky Doll and the Echo. If you dig cinema and like our music please, have a look on our Double project: a music video & a short movie. We will collaborate with a director, Costas Gounaris, for our first music video! Our page is here: http://igg.me/p/297701/ Every cent counts and everyone wins gifts too!

By the way…this is the song of the music video:

YouTube HTML5 Switch (and other news)

Hello! Long time no see!

It’s been a busy period and I have lots of news to share. First of all, I decided to have a look on the Mozilla Add-on SDK . It has a very simple API to create Add-ons for Firefox.

Anyway, I tried to come up with an idea of what would be my first Add-on. Hmmm…An Add-on that can make my web experience less annoying. Considering that I spend half of my time on YouTube to listen to songs (mostly), view videos etc, as a Linux user, I get really annoyed when the Flash plug-in crashes and I have to restart Firefox.ย  You can always visit youtube.com/html5 to change that but what if you delete your cookies? It’s a boring procedure.

youtube_html5_switch_logo
YouTube HTML5 Switch logo

So, what I thought was to make an Add-on that would simply add the “html5=1” parameter on the URL. And I did it…well, kind of, it’s now an experimental Add-on for Firefox. I need to add some more features for it to be considered as a proper Add-on. It’s called “YouTube HTML5 Switch” and here it is at the Mozilla Add-ons website, and here is the source code on Github.

I currently develop the Add-on at the Add-on Builder (that means online). I will eventually download the SDK and try it on Fedora ๐Ÿ™‚ It’s not the smartest Add-on in the world, but I think it’s a good start for a newbie. By the way I need to say that the SDK’s documentation is not very helpful and I needed to google a lot to write down a few lines of code. Anyway, in every “major” release I will be posting here any changes etc. You can also read the README.md on Github.

What’s more? Wonky Doll and the Echo (the band where I play) are supporting I Like Trains here in Athens on December 15, 2012. You can check our Bandcamp page and listen to our songs. Now, if you have installed the Add-on you can test it with these video…if you go on YouTube of course ๐Ÿ™‚

Some videos like this for instance don’t have an HTML5 player so the plugin will not be of any use here.

Other videos though, do have have an HTML5 version and the plugin will work!

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