Interview: Steve Streza of Twisted Ninja Software and Tubular

Although there are a few apps that allow the user to download videos from YouTube, such as TubeSock, there is no true app for browsing YouTube. That’s where Tubular comes in. Recently, I had a chance to talk with Steve Streza, the developer behind Tubular and SnapShooter. We talked about his applications, setup, future projects, and featured a nice bonus at the end for all MacApper readers.

Conner: Hey, thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

Steve: Hey Conner. Thanks for having me.

Conner: For the readers who may not know much about you, what projects and other applications have you done?

Steve: I’m currently working on Tubular, which is a Mac app that is a front-end to YouTube. That’s been my labor of love for almost 10 months. Before that, my main application was SnapShooter, a tool to put borders around screenshots. I began working on that in January 2005 for the brand new (back then) forums for MacThemes.net, and pretty much stopped working on it in April 2006. I also wrote two little mini-apps that were well received. One was called DeskTunes, which displays the album art and information about the currently playing iTunes song. I wrote and released that in 6 hours on an all-nighter in October 2006. The other was called Nine Figures. That was more of a fun toy app, as all it did was display the number of songs sold on iTunes in your menu bar. I released three versions of that, when Apple had their contests for the 100 million, 500 million, and 1 billion song milestones.

Conner: What was the inspiration for Tubular, and why did you choose to make it?

Steve: Tubular was born in July 2006. I had decided a few months earlier to stop working on SnapShooter, as I was growing bored with it, and I wanted a new project. At the same time, I was on summer break from college, and became addicted to YouTube. There were some shortcomings with the site that I didn’t much like; for instance, I really wanted to put a lot of these videos on my iPod, but I couldn’t with just YouTube. So, I started thinking about how to turn YouTube into a Mac application. Eventually I had a working prototype, and I started crafting it into what it is now.

Conner: How is Tubular going so far?

Steve: Tubular is coming together a lot nicer than it was a couple months ago. We hit some pretty rocky bumps when we were changing our playback system. Tubular was originally just embedding the YouTube flash player into the application window. It worked, but it was hardly optimal. On top of that, our system to get the video URL was breaking, and needed to be replaced with a more robust system. So we started integrating Tubular with Perian, a set of open source QuickTime components (including one for decoding Flash video), and rewriting our video download system. The private beta release we put out worked pretty well, but was crashy. After a couple more beta releases, we’ve improved the stability and performance quite a bit.

From here on out, we’re going to try and work with the Perian developers to get streaming playback. We’re also going to be cleaning up a lot of the little bugs that are here and there. Furthermore, we’re going to be working to make Tubular run faster.

After the 1.0, we’ve got a ton of ideas for things to do. One previously unannounced feature that we’ll be putting into Tubular 1.1 is a tool to manage YouTube feed subscriptions. You’ll be able to subscribe to any YouTube RSS feed, which will update itself with the new videos in the feed. We’re also thinking about making it possible to automatically have those videos downloaded and converted to your iPod, if you want. That’s one thing we’ll be working on. We’ve got a lot of features in our sights, though.

Conner: What made you decide to make SnapShooter, the handy screenshot application?

Steve: Long winded story ahead. I was working for MacThemes.net as a writer in 2004. In January 2005, they launched a new web forum for people into GUI customization. There was a thread in there for posting screenshots of your desktop. People posted whenever they got new wallpapers, new icons, new ShapeShifter themes, etc. However, everybody’s monitor is really big, compared to the size of a web forum. So if you put a full screenshot inline in a thread, it would usually break the forum design. To solve this problem, some of the artists on the site started creating some beautiful borders to put your screenshots. The premise was that after you downloaded these borders, which were usually Photoshop files, you would take a screenshot, open it in Photoshop, resize it, position it, mask it out, then save it out to a PNG and upload it to your web server.

But the list of problems coming from this solution is huge. First, the entire idea is based upon the fact that everyone who wants to use this border has to own a copy of Photoshop, which costs $650. Second, it takes some skill in using Photoshop to figure out how to properly set everything up the way you need to - random people couldn’t just open their screenshot and do the resizing, positioning, and masking needed without learning the tool. Third, the time it takes to do this is immense. Photoshop is an insanely complicated app, which is great for a versatile image editing tool. But it made for a terrible experience for this common (relatively speaking) task. I wanted to do it right.

The application does exactly what it’s supposed to do - help you frame screenshots. It manages all of your borders for you, and you just select the one you want. You could drag in or paste a screenshot, or you could even let the app take it for you (after hiding itself). Drag it around and resize it all you want. It then gets masked, and you can save it wherever you want. The app had some support for automatically uploading to FTP, SFTP, and .Mac, which I was hoping to extend even further to include support for uploading to Flickr and other photo services.

Conner: What is your current hardware setup?

Steve: Currently I’m running off of a 15″ MacBook Pro with a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of RAM. I also have my two external hard drives, lovingly named Sephiroth and Kefka. Kefka is a fun drive. It’s a 250 GB drive with 8 partitions on it. On it, I have separate installations of Tiger, Leopard, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, and Fedora Core 6, as well as a blank partition used for installing new versions of those operating systems. I also have my server, which is a PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25 GHz with 1 GB of RAM. That hosts my source code backup, and is used for general file sharing with my roommates. It’s also responsible for running the YouTube test cases. There are several dozen tests that check YouTube every couple of hours to alert me if YouTube breaks Tubular in some way.

Conner: Do you currently have any plans for the future?

Steve: A ton. My next confirmed and public project will be one of the top 24 from My Dream App, called Ground Control. In a nutshell, Ground Control will be a tool aimed at people who really like making their computers work for them. Specifically, it’s a utility bar that passively displays information about other apps, so the number of new emails you have, any items you’ve got coming up today in your calendar, etc. It will be very customizable to fit your workflow, because we will be including the option to create custom skins and plugins. It’s a bit of a complicated idea, and requires more words than a paragraph could elucidate, so take a look at our new just-launched home at GroundControlApp.com.

I’m also looking into numerous possibilities involved with web development. I won’t say anything specifically, but there are some very interesting ideas that I want to see explored on the web.

Conner: What’s in your dock?

Steve: My Dock got replaced long ago by Quicksilver for most of my application launching. But there are a few things I keep in there as reminders. Adium, Camino, Mail, and iTunes are pretty much always open if my computer is on, so they’re on there. I keep Xcode and Interface Builder there too. Aside from those standard ones, I also have Cha-Ching, TextMate, Xtorrent, Coda, CSSEdit, and Parallels.

Conner: What Mac related website(s) do you read?

Steve: A good portion of my major news comes from Digg, which I enjoy reading if only for the people who are as adamant about Linux as we are about Mac. I also read MacRumors quite a bit. Aside from that, most of my Mac news comes from forums and blogs. I’ve read blogs from a number of people, including John Gruber, Wil Shipley, Daniel Jalkut, Cabel Sasser, Jonathan Rentzsch, and Dustin MacDonald. I don’t really read a whole lot of news websites like MacNN because most of the stuff on those kind of sites reads like a press release - if the site doesn’t read well, I probably won’t stick around long. I also participate in the forums at My Dream App, where I am a moderator, and MacThemes.net, where I was a writer. But my list of links is not static at all; my RSS feeds change around a lot.

Conner: Thank you for this interview, it was nice to talk to you.

Steve: Thanks again for having me on. For your readers, we’ve got a special coupon code that’ll let you get Tubular for $3 off. Go to the Tubular site at TubularApp.com, click on “Coupon”, and enter “MACAPPER” without the quotation marks, or follow this link. Thanks for checking it out!

I encourage you to check out Tubular, as it seems really cool, and the coupon code should make you want to buy it even more. Check out Steve’s site, and be sure to order your copy of Tubular today.