In my ongoing coverage of YouTube apps for iOS (a rising trend following the removal of the official YouTube app from iOS 6), I have been able to test Jasmine, a new YouTube client developed by Jason Morrissey, creator of Alien Blue.

If you’re looking for a YouTube app that’s elegantly designed, easy to use, and that runs both on the iPhone and iPad, I think Jasmine is your best option for now. And knowing Jason, I believe the app will soon get better with fixes, more features, and improvements to the interface. I’ve been testing Jasmine for the past two weeks, and especially on the iPad, the app has become my go-to client when I want to sit back and watch some videos on YouTube.

Both on the iPhone and iPad, the app has a light gray color scheme with font and menu navigation choices somewhat reminiscent of Morrissey’s work with Alien Blue; the app is fast at moving between sections, and you can tap on the status bar to switch to a “night mode” that makes the entire UI black. On the iPad, the app makes use of a Tweetie-inspired panel navigation, both in portrait and landscape mode; the performances are good, and panels contribute to facilitating the process of instantly seeing whether a video belongs to a playlist or a search query. Speaking of search, one of Jasmine’s nicest touches is the search field, which rotates and expands inline with a cute animation. I’d like to see search suggestions in a future update, though.

In Jasmine – like any other client these days – you can log into your YouTube account, or use the app to just search and browse YouTube content. The main screen/panel features shortcuts for search, browse, favorites, playlists, subscriptions, and recently played videos. The latter is just a local collection of videos you’ve watched on your device – it won’t sync with History on YouTube.com or another instance of Jasmine on another device (idea: iCloud sync could be used to sync videos across devices). The “Subscriptions” section, on the other hand, does synchronize with channels you’ve subscribed to through YouTube’s website (or another app), and lets you watch videos on a single channel basis, as well as a list of “latest videos” from all subscriptions – a useful feature to catch up on every new upload. Furthermore, if you want to discover more channels, you can search, enter a specific username, or check out YouTube recommendations in-app.

As I used Jasmine, I noticed I kept coming back to the “Browse” area. I don’t typically do this on the (cluttered) YouTube website, but I found myself casually checking out YouTube’s Featured and Trending videos a lot more with Jasmine.

Both channels and videos are presented with their own custom page. Videos have a large thumbnail at the top (which you can tap to play), and more actions below, such as comments (you can leave new ones), a link to the uploader’s page, description, ratings, related videos, mark as favorite, add to playlist, and share. Sharing supports the services iOS natively comes with, and is presented through the new iOS 6 share sheet. There is no option to set a specific streaming quality (like in Tube+), but there’s a setting you can turn on to be asked every time which kind of quality you’d like to load a video with (medium, 720p, etc).

If you don’t want to open a video page to share or mark as favorite, you can swipe on a result to bring up an action bar with buttons to share, add to playlists, and star. The same can be accomplished by tapping & holding a video, and I wish this feature also allowed me to quickly open an uploader’s page, like FoxTube does.

There are some things I wish Jasmine did better. For instance, I can’t find a section to catch up on the videos I “saved for later” on YouTube; and speaking of available sections, I think that, on the iPad, the larger screen could allow for an option to save personal shortcuts (say, to a playlist or search) in the sidebar.

On the surface, Jasmine looks extremely simple. But don’t let the app’s clean design and no-clutter approach fool you: Jasmine packs a lot of YouTube functionalities as well as nicely implemented little touches (the pinch-to-close gesture to dismiss panels on the iPad, the custom pull-to-refresh animation) that make for an intuitive and pleasant YouTube experience on iOS. And like I said above, if you own an iPad and have been looking for a great YouTube client, you should check out Jasmine.

Jasmine is free, with an in-app purchase to unlock parental controls and support the development of the app.

With Apple removing the built-in YouTube app from iOS 6 and Google releasing its own (pretty good) official app on the App Store, we should expect a renewed interest in third-party YouTube clients offering alternative features and designs. Tube+ is one of the first apps to hit with the “new wave” of YouTube clients, and I like it.

Developed by Chocomoko, Tube+ is simpler, both in terms of design and functionalities, than YouTube’s own app, or my favorite third-party client to date, FoxTube. You shouldn’t judge Tube+ by its streamlined appearance, however, as the app has access to some features and options that not even the official YouTube app has (for now). You can use Tube+ with or without a YouTube account; if you log in with your credentials, you’ll gain the possibility to check out your subscriptions, favorites, watch later videos. and uploads. If you don’t log in, you’ll still get access to regular search, Featured, Top Rated, Top Favorites, and Most Popular videos. To get the best experience, I obviously recommend logging into the service with your account.

The interface of Tube+ revolves around three tabs: Videos, Search, and Downloads. I’d like to focus on Downloads right away: unlike many other apps that had to remove a similar functionality, Tube+ (still?) allows you to download videos and keep them in a local cache so you can watch them offline. And the best part is, when you hit the download button on a video page, you’ll be asked to choose the “format you prefer” – you can download at 360p, 720p, 1080p, and all the in-between options YouTube provides. Tube+’s offline caching functionality is simple and effective, but you won’t be able to organize downloaded videos in local playlists or folders.

The main tab, Videos, is where you’ll spend most of your time. Here, you have various options to navigate around YouTube content using the top bar, which, similarly to Tweetbot, is actually made of buttons to change sections. The left button, a profile icon, is used to switch between public contents-only or your account; the button on the right lets you choose the default quality of YouTube videos you’ll stream, from 240p and up to 1080p with an “auto” option that loads videos depending on your Internet connection. Last, the main area of the top bar lets you switch between the aforementioned supported YouTube sections, your subscriptions, and videos you’ve liked or saved for later.

What I like about Tube+ is the control it gives me over the quality of videos I stream and download, but, more importantly, its speed and responsiveness. Tube+ is fast: sections load in a snap, video thumbnails load instantaneously when searching. There is a “load more” button to fetch more content from search, and the developers implemented the new iOS 6 pull-to-refresh mechanism to make it easy to check for updates or simply reload a page (note: Tube+ requires iOS 6). Alongside with notable performance, I appreciate the decisions behind the feature set of Tube+: again, it’s not as rich as YouTube or FoxTube, but you can still subscribe to channels and add videos to playlists, share videos with your friends, write comments, like, dislike, and mark a video as favorite.

There are some things I think Tube+ could do better. Firstly, I don’t like how, when sharing on Facebook or iMessage, the app uses its own short URL instead of regular YouTube links. This is particularly inconvenient for services that generate thumbnail previews only for YouTube URLs, like Twitter and Facebook. Second, I’d like to see an option to easily open an uploader’s video page – this is something that FoxTube still gets perfectly right in my opinion.

Overall, Tube+ offers a clean and fast experience – particularly if you use search a lot, you’re going to notice the speed of the app compared to Google’s official YouTube client. Tube+ doesn’t have the same amount of features YouTube and FoxTube have (for instance, there’s no separation of videos and channels in search results), but at $0.99 with offline caching, a good feature set and an elegant design, you should definitely consider Tube+.