Welcome To Devils Workshop!!!

The Devil is in the Workshop
Watch Videos on YouTube much faster with YouTube Feather
Google goes in for the minimalist look

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 04:08 AM PST

Every now and then winds of change come to Devils Workshop and presently we are in one such situation. After getting some random suggestions and feedback from our readers we have decided to make changes to Devils Workshop’s design.

So now the Devils (rtCamp Developers and Web Designers) are all in the workshop implementing ideas and testing them.

The Devil is in the Workshop

Your opinions matter…

We are fiercely proud of our readers and contributors as they constantly keep suggesting changes through email or random comments. We have kept some suggestions in mind before taking this road to redesign, but we want more opinions and ideas from you. Best way to do this is to comment to this post. Rest assured we will be monitoring the comments very closely for ideas.

If you have an idea, as suggestion do write in a comment to let us know and we will try to work with those ideas. If you do not have any ideas then the best way to help us would be to write in what you like in the present design through your comments.

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Watch Videos on YouTube much faster with YouTube Feather

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 02:50 AM PST

YouTube has released a new labs feature, entitled Feather. With this, YouTube strives to stream videos much faster, by removing the extra bells and whistles that accompany a normal YouTube video page and also by using advanced web techniques. The main aim is to reduce the latency wherever possible.

According to the feature announcement:

… is intended to serve YouTube video watch pages with the lowest latency possible. It achieves this by severely limiting the features available to the viewer and making use of advanced web techniques for reducing the total amount of bytes downloaded by the browser.

You can see the screenshot below:

Youtubecompare

To view full-size screenshot of the feather vesion, click here.

The increase in performance can be verified by Chrome’s dev tools:

youtube-feather-graph
The resources downloaded when you watch a video only have 52 KB, instead of 391 KB. [via Google Operating System]

While using the feather-feature, many normal functions of YouTube are stopped, for eg, there are no ‘more videos from this user’, non-collapsible Related Videos, you cannot rate videos or post comments among others. Also much of the styling is foregone.

Although it is much faster, to load the page as well as videos, I personally wasn’t to please with it. But it does come in handy while watching 1080p HD videos.

You can access this feature via this link: http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta

Win $150 Every Month in "Bloggers$ of The Month" Award

Writing for Devils Workshop and other blogs in our network just got better!

Now you can be "Blogger$ of The Month" and win from $150 cash prizes, in addition to direct 100% AdSense revnue from your post.
Read More...

Google goes in for the minimalist look

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 08:13 PM PST

After weeks of calibration and testing, Google has finally settled for the minimalist look on their homepage. What it does is, when you load the page you just see the Google logo, the search box, Google search and I’m Feeling Lucky button and the language options (if any). Now if you just move your mouse a little, BINGO, the usual google interface fades in.

Google-Minimalist

Google Minimalist

From the official google blog:

For the vast majority of people who come to the Google homepage, they are coming in order to search, and this clean, minimalist approach gives them just what they are looking for first and foremost. For those users who are interested in using a different application like Gmail, Google Image Search or our advertising programs, the additional links on the homepage only reveal themselves when the user moves the mouse.

Over the testing period, the engineers tried over 10 variants of the minimalist-to-fade-in look, and finally settled for the one which majority of the users settled for. Among the variants, one output was like the one below (the time when the Google implemented the barcode doodle):

But why did they do it? Well its all about, ‘How simple can you get?’. Twitter, with only 140 characters, is the benchmark of simplicity. Now even with its real-time searches and Bing, well Google had to do something to up its ante!