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ReviewTube: YouTube/Flex mashup adds your captions to videos

ReviewTube is a Flex 2 application that allows users to create time-based subtitles for any YouTube video, a la closed captioning. These captions become publicly accessible, and visitors to the site can browse the set of videos with captions. Think of it as a “subtitle graffiti wall” for YouTube!

I wrote ReviewTube partly because I think it’s a fun and potentially useful idea, but also as a sample application illustrating design patterns covered in my MAX 2006 presentation on Flex Best Practices, with a subject that’s squarely in the Web 2.0 realm and which leverages a lot of the strengths of the Flex/Flash platform. I’ll be posting the full source code for the client here around the time of that presentation, in late October.

(The server side of ReviewTube is written in Ruby on Rails. It’s something of a parenthesis to the rest of the project. I had very little time available, and I chose Rails because I wanted to check it out and see if it was as productive an environment as I’d heard. I got the server app written and running in about 4 hours, and have spent maybe another 4 hours total on the server, so I’d have to say the answer is a resounding “yes”. I’m not ready to endorse Rails as a platform for full-blown production systems, but it certainly is great for hacking a database/XML web app in no time flat.)