Jen Kagan: day 18: the case of the missing vine api and the add-on sdk

Четверг, 16 Июня 2016 г. 00:17 + в цитатник

i’m trying to add vine support to min-vid and realizing that i’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around the min-vid program structure.

what does adding vine support even mean? it means that when you’re on vine.co, i want you to be able to right click on any video on the website, send it to the corner of your browser, and watch vines in the corner while you continue your browsing.

i’m running into a few obstacles. one obstacle is that i can’t find an official vine api. what’s an api? it stands for “application programming interface” (maybe? i think? no, i’m not googling) and i don’t know the official definition, but my unofficial definition is that the api is documentation i need from vine about how to access and manipulate content they have on their website. i need to be able to know the pattern for structuring video URLs. i need to know what functions to call in order to autoplay, loop, pause, and mute their videos. since this doesn’t exist in an official, well-documented way, i made a gist of their embed.js file, which i think/hope maybe controls their embedded videos, and which i want to eventually make sense of by adding inline comments.

another obstacle is that mozilla’s add-on sdk is really weirdly structured. i wrote about this earlier and am still sketching it out. here’s what i’ve gathered so far:

the page you navigate to in your browser is a page. with its own DOM. this is the page DOM.
the firefox add-on is made of content scripts (CS) and page scripts (PS).
the CS talks to the page DOM and the PS talks to the page DOM, but the CS and the PS don’t talk to each other.
with min-vid, the CS is index.js. this controls the context menu that comes up when you right click, and it’s the thing that tells the panel to show itself in the corner.
the two PS’s in min-vid are default.html and controls.js. the default.html PS loads the stuff inside the panel. the controls.js PS lets you control the stuff that’s in the panel.

so far, i can get the vine video to show up in the panel, but only after i’ve sent a youtube video to the panel. i can’t the vine video to show up on its own, and i’m not sure why. this makes me sad. here is a sketch: