22 October 2011

A new look for YouTube’s playlist bar

As you probably know if you visit even casually, whenever you visit a playlist – including ‘special’ ones like ‘History’ or ‘Liked’ – the site shows a bar with several controls on the bottom, similar to a mini-music player. Starting yesterday – as far as I noticed – this bar got a new look, with bigger, dear I say more + -like buttons and some minor changes to their location – ‘Options’ was moved to the far right. The video thumbnails also got a facelift, with the video title now occupying the right half of the thumbnail, which looks nicer; of course, that means you will see a lot less previews at once. I don’t think there are any changes feature-wise, maybe except for the fact that you can now hide the previews with a single click – this makes the arrows on the right end pretty much redundant. You can also easily reorder videos: while hovering over a thumbnail, a small gray bar appears; grab it and drag the video to another position. I’m not sure if these two things were available before. YouTube new look for the playlist bar

Given the amount of horizontal space on the playlist bar, I would like to see some other settings added here, for example sharing buttons or the controls to toggle the privacy status. Right now they are hidden away under not very clear menu entries. ‘More information…’ and ‘Edit or delete…’ lead to different pages and I think they could be unified in a single interface, considering there aren’t that many options for a given playlist.

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