Snapie Player being deprecated?

It would seem like getting videos on Snapie is a task that has already been completed — and that’s partially true. But it’s not where it needs to be. At least not for me.

As a matter of fact, I’m not the only one who isn’t too happy with the video player on Snapie Mobile. Why? I hear you asking. Well, because it’s a WebView — a little embedded chunk of a website, if you will. What does that mean? I hear you asking yet again. It means I have to inject JavaScript into it so it does what I want. But it also means it stabs me in the back half the time.

Such is the nature of working with these tech stacks, of combining things into a UX soup. Sometimes the recipe works — it’s good. And sometimes there’s a certain fermenty flavor that just doesn’t belong. It’s not yogurt, after all.

I’ll go ahead and call out @mondoshawan for a minute. He’s been reminding me lately that the play button sitting in the middle of everyone’s face (on Android) is not very pleasant — and I agree. In my defense, I’ve tried a thousand different ways to get it to go away while remaining operational. Invisible, yet functional. But I can’t seem to get the darn thing to behave.

So I’m going nuclear. Again.

My brother sent me a little document detailing a library I could use in React to create what would effectively be a native Snapie player. After a long discussion with myself — and lots of planning — I’ve come up with the battle plan.

I’m not entirely broken up about the fact that the current Snapie player will be retired from the mobile app, because it will continue living on snapie.io and other Hive front ends. And to be fair, it will now serve another function for Snapie Mobile. It will give me the information I need from the videos to properly feed the new player. Almost like passing the buck — except this time it’s not a buck, it’s JSON. Yes, that made sense when I wrote it.

At any rate… videos, videos, videos.

But what can you do? It’s all about making Snapie better, right?

MenO