Launching video section on iOS Feeds

When I originally launched iOSFeeds.com I had no plans for video section. But then Stewart Lynch mentioned on Twitter that YouTube section would be nice and pointed out, that iOS Dev Directory already contains section with listed YouTube channels (I someshow missed this).

So I made a note in my to-do app and started thinking about it. When I started building the videos, I realized I can re-use a lot of the code for importing standard RSS feeds and also YouTube feeds have all the same format, which is super nice, since each video has published date in the same format.

This meant that I can just list videos in the order they were published on YouTube and don't have to do initial imports like I had to for blogs because a lot of them don't have published dates available for posts.

The videos section follows the same format as the homepage + I have added thumbnails. These are fetched directly from YouTube which means I don't have to worry about storing them and about possible updates. Some don't work and I hope to find out why.

There is also modal player for the video (if you tap the play button) which immediately starts playing the selected video. I built this so folks can quickly sample videos by various creators and don't have to immediately jump to YouTube which will try to server clickbait-y content..

There is one down-side with the "in-line" player and that is no like buttons. I hope this won't have negative effects on the creators. My thinking is that once someone watches few videos at max over iOS Feeds, then they will subscribe and will watch the next videos via YouTube. And so iOS Feeds will serve mainly for the discovery purpose.

Thanks for reading. If you have YouTube channel about iOS, Swift or other relevant topic for Apple developers, add it to iOS Dev Directory so your videos can get indexed.