Static StreetViews and cros-platform YouTube

[Sergey Chernyshev]

Something struck me this morning and I realized that some widgets were created quite a while ago and I revisited two widgets featured on homepage - Street Views and YouTube.

Street Views now have static version (which loads much faster). It can with some weird discovery that two versions of Google APIs are not really compatible and you have to make some adjustments to the parameters (and even values) so be careful with just globally changing from interactive to static. Being web performance geek, I might go completely crazy and make a version in the future that uses progressive enhancement and loads static version first, but then updates it with interactive one once page is fully loaded, but don't expect it too soon.

And YouTube now uses their new embed format with iframe which auto-detects the device and loads HTML5 version of the video when flash is not supported (e.g. iPad, iPhone). Keep in mind that some old videos might not have a video source on Youtube that is supported for those devices (apparently they didn't transcode old videos).

There is still more to add as both APIs allow for tons of different things, but it requires for MediaWiki Widgets project to be more active and as I rarely have these spurs of activity, it can only happen if community helped with it.

All you need to do is just volunteer for security review process (web security skills required) and contribute a widget or two a year (some developer skills required) and it'll be flourishing.

In any case, I hope you enjoy it the way it is already.

           Sergey