This is really nice. Would you mind chatting with me sometime? I'd love to pick your brain or even just converse with someone who has similar interests. I've spent the past two years developing Streamus, https://streamus.com/, an open-source music player which runs off of YouTube as a browser extension; it has 130,000 users currently.
YouTube now defaults to using the <video> element unless the video would show an advertisement. In those scenarios, it falls back to using the flash player.
Creator of Streamus here. :) Nice app! Feel free to look through Streamus' codebase for ideas if you'd like, https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension Just give attribution where appropriate.
I like your idea of using Billboard and iTunes charts. While not integrated into the actual UI, Streamus does integrate with Beatport's charts and I have BBC1's charts on my radar. I suppose others could be added as well, but not something I'm looking to do in the short term.
There's actually some semblance of user accounts with Streamus -- they're just not required. I do generate unique IDs for every installation and that can sync across PCs using chrome.storage.sync, but there isn't a lot of protection against malicious activity on that at this point. That is pretty much my #1 priority after I finish ironing out the last of some client-side bugs. I will be adding support for various openID logins and making users who aren't signed-in "second class citizens" while disabling the ability to delete records -- just providing them with the ability to mark them deleted so they don't show up client-side. That way someone can't go on a rampage nuking unauthenticated user data.
Anyway, keep up the good work. Happy to help you with any snares you encounter in building your extension. There's more than a couple 'gotchas' :)
I have been following you and congrats on making the front page of Reddit! You're too awesome. Streamus helped me a lot when I ran into a few problems dealing issues with YouTube player API. Thank you so much for offering to help me like this. I am grateful to have Instant Music noticed by you and I will make sure to keep up the good work and build something that people really need.
"1. normal people don't install extensions in their browser. so a bit hard to go mainstream.
2. you're riding on top of a service (youtube) that can shut you down.
3. music is a tough space for investors generally - many (like me) have just stayed away from it."
Hi! I made this! I've spent the last 16 months working nights/weekends on it and I think it has come a long ways.
If anyone has any questions about the development process, how anything about it works, or even some constructive criticism... please don't hesitate to share! Thanks!
Yep. I am working on it. YouTube mixes utilize YouTube's V3 API (exclusively) where as most of their data can be access via the V2 or V3 API. When I first started working on the project V3 wasn't out yet and it has been slow become a production worthy API, but I'm hearing better things about it now and am certainly planning on revisiting the code.
I make this sweet Google Chrome extension for fun in my spare time: http://streamus.com It's a YouTube music player that I find more useful than Spotify b/c it integrates well with the browser. I've put 16 months of nights/weekends into it. It has 14k users, 4.8/5 in the web store and is completely open-source:
I find it fun for a TON of reasons. I'm learning a lot more about programming than I ever had in the past. This is the first time I've ever been super interested in absorbing material because it has a great impact upon me.
I get messages from people all around the world every day saying thanks for the work. That feeling is super rewarding -- more so than a paycheck. I've had to bust out Google Translator to try and decipher messages and hold conversations, had people tell me their dreams of getting to America or even something as simple as just being excited to talk to the developer. It's really great.
Finally, it solves a problem I was having and for that I am stoked! I went from having tons of bookmarks organizing music on YouTube to having a much more friendly interface for storing and listening to the music.
I work on a YouTube music player for Chrome as a side-project: http://streamus.com/. It has done reasonably well for itself - 14k users and a 4.8/5 in the store.
I think my front-end is pretty standard: jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Transit, qTip2, Backbone, Backbone Marionette, Lo-Dash, Jasmine.
Back-end is all Microsoft-land because I was more comfortable building it in C#. NHibernate (ORM), AutoFac (Dependency Injection), AutoMapper (DTO<->Domain object mapper), NUnit (Test). Database is MSSQL. It's hosted by AppHarbor: https://appharbor.com/
This is really nice. Would you mind chatting with me sometime? I'd love to pick your brain or even just converse with someone who has similar interests. I've spent the past two years developing Streamus, https://streamus.com/, an open-source music player which runs off of YouTube as a browser extension; it has 130,000 users currently.
Hit me up if you want to chat! admin@streamus.com and if you'd like to browse the repo, https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension