Viddler

I’m finding it more and more difficult to keep all of you up-to-date with all of the great features and bug fixes that our development team is consistently releasing here on Viddler. This is a good problem! I thought I’d run through a few things that have been updated recently.

New features

You may have noticed some of these on the site as you’ve been using Viddler over the past few days, but just in case you missed them:

• Clickable links now show up in the flash player! If you add a timed comment to a video that contains a URL, we’ll make it clickable. This is a precursor to a new feature we’ll be adding to allow you to add links to your videos, but since many of you decided to hack the comment system to add links we thought we’d convert them all for you.
• Setting video thumbnails is now available under the + button on the player. Until now this feature was limited only to our closed administration section but thanks to all of you requesting this feature (up to three months ago) everyone can decide what frame should be the thumbnail for their videos.
• User tag feeds are now available and browser discoverable. When we launched version 2 we aimed to have feeds available for just about every page and we’ve found that we had a few pages missing feeds. Global tag searches, and user tag searches, now have web feeds. So now you can subscribe to someone’s MeToday videos while not getting their other videos. Or, you can use the ViddlerRSS WordPress plugin to only syndicate your MeToday videos. All types of possibilities!

Bug fixes

I won’t list every bug we’ve fixed over the last few weeks (since there have been dozens) but here are some of the highlights that you might be interested in:

• Many Safari enhancements (both Windows and Mac versions) have been added over the last few months. We had a few Safari specific bugs that were plaguing the site but much progress has been made for those of you browsing our site with Safari. As a side note, this makes our site work much better on the iPhone (since I reply to forum posts and message via my iPhone I love this fact). Don’t have an iPhone? We’re giving away two!
• Your favorite videos are now ordered by when you set them as favorites. Did you ever wonder why they were ordered any differently? Now when you’re looking at my favorite videos you can see them in the order that I added them as favorites! Do you mark videos as favorites?
• Play all bugs that plagued Firefox users have been fixed. What’s “Play all”? Say you are watching the latest WineLibraryTV episode and you’d like to watch all past episodes. Click on “Play all” on the right hand side and a new window will open, loading all of the previous videos on the bottom. Viddler will automatically switch to the next video for you or you can click on the thumbnail for the video you want to watch. Think of it as a Viddler remote control!

Each and every day our development team; Lukasz (axemaster), Kasper (jhammer), Maciek (drkn), and our designer Andrew (andrew) are developing, testing, and releasingnew features and bug fixes to make your experience here on Viddler more enjoyable. Please take the time to check out some of these latest enhancements and let them know what you think.

Our development team is still looking for help! We’re looking for a Quality Assurance engineer to help with testing upcoming versions of Viddler. Check out that blog post for more details, I know the guys would really appreciate the help.

Until next time, keep Viddling!