KM-CODEX

I just added a new version of YaYa (Yet Another Youtube App) to the downloads section called “YaYa Video Poster”. This latest version is targeted to users with Facebook accounts and if you do not use Facebook the original version should be the one you use instead. Both versions are in my downloads section.

Built with Flex 4 (Flashbuilder) and exported as an Adobe Air desktop app, YaYa Video Poster will let you upload any video in  your local library to your Facebook wall and it also lets you add a description for the wall post. The post title is the name of the video itself. When the application opens the first time it will let you login to your Facebook account and ask you to grant it the permissions it needs and once it has those permissions (namely to upload videos to your Face book account) it runs normally every instance after. If for some reason you do not grant it permission the Facebook specific abilities are hidden and it will run like the normal YaYa. Have fun and drop me a line if you have any problems. YaYa will have another version coming out once Adobe Air 2 is released so stay tuned!

Whenever you are watching videos, whether in window mode or full screen mode, clicking the left or right arrow keys on your keyboard will flip forward and back through your active playlist.

As of the 1.1 release, YaYa is now based on Flex 4 instead of Flex 3. As expected the entire app had to be reworked due to the massive differences in the flex frameworks between versions and while many of the changes are behind the scenes and code related, some of more important front end changes users will notice are:

1. The YaYa Video Player is now a Spark Video Player Component – Video controls are much more responsive now and the video player can be switched into a true full screen mode. To exit full screen you simply hit the ESC key.

2. Download ability separated from search results – in the old version you downloaded and tracked the download status from the list of YouTube returns. This did not allow you to perform another search until all downloads were complete. The new version handles downloads differently and you can download items while performing a new search. You can add items to the download cue as many times as you like no matter what else is going on in the app.

3. Cue to master playlist – in the old version the library was it’s own playlist and the YouTube search results were their own playlist. In the new version you cue items from the library or YouTube search results to your “Active Playlist”. Dropped videos and direct loaded videos are also added to the active playlist now so in theory your active playlist can contain items from four possible cue directions. Items can be removed from the active playlist individually or the entire active playlist can be cleared.

4. Papervision now integrated – the panels are now animated with Papervision effects. The Accordion from the old version is gone and now the control bar is on the right of the app and all buttons are active or disabled depending on what is going on around them.

5. Online User Guide added – inside there is a link to view/download the YaYa User Guide.

Screenshots follow:

YaYa’s focus is Flash video, Adobe AIR and local databases. NOT YouTube. NOT Adware.

YaYa isn’t meant to bring your YouTube user account to the desktop. It’s meant to let you enjoy Flash video without overlays or clutter. It isnt meant to draw you in with a hidden agenda of selling ad space, there isn’t a drop of advertising in it (nor will there ever be) other than a link to my site which you can see is NOT heavy on sales.  YaYa is meant to freely let you cue up 100′s of your favorite videos from your Library…send them to the player (and maybe even pump it to a big screen like my friend does in his bar)…hide the controls and let it do it’s thing. Nothing more, nothing less.

Most YouTube apps ALWAYS require the internet. YaYa doesn’t. Once you have some favorite videos downloaded (and you can download up to 50 at a time btw) you can unhook the modem and get your groove on.

Like I said in another article. When it comes to FLV, I want what I want when I want it. With the YaYa library being local I can pretty well guarantee that my favorite videos will be ready when I want them to be whether I’m tethered to the internet or not or whether or not YouTube’s service is available.

A few years back I added Yahoo Maps to my Koolmoves and Flex based forums (myBBS and FlexBBS) and users could pick their location on earth at registration and it was also used for the “who is online” panel to show who was online at any given time. It was a Yahoo Staff Pick back then and hugely popular with my users but I removed it from later forums builds and versions because the Yahoo Map API was AS2 based and I was migrating to AS3 and figured I would revisit the ability once the API’s went AS3. I always wanted to use a Google map instead of Yahoo but at the time the Google Map API was not as useful to me (in the context of what I was doing) as Yahoo’s was. This is no longer the case and the Google Map AS3 API is pretty slick and has my gears already spinning to add the maps back to my KM-CODEX Desktop app. Long story short, expect to see this added to the next build of “Power Windows”.