UI/UX improvements

[michaelsanford]

:thumbsup:

[NebuPookins]

Can you investigate writing the front end in Sencha?

[michaelsanford]

Might be overkill for this, having used it a lot.

I think AngularJS + Bootstrap might be a good alternative for the UI (which I envision remaining fairly minimal, when compared to something like an analytics portal?)

[NebuPookins]

The UI I'm envisioning is like iTunes, RhythmBox, Songbird, etc.

[michaelsanford]

I'll take a look at Sencha Touch, which I assume is what you meant.

I'll also look at Angular, just in case.

[NebuPookins]

I actually mean "real" Sencha. When I tried the Sencha Touch demo, my user experience is actually quite horrible (e.g. clicks are interpreted as drags, etc.), and the mobile version doesn't seem to have any UI that resembles anything you'd see in e.g. iTunes

In contrast, there's a few demos in the "real Sencha" that look like they could implement the widgets you'd expect on traditional desktop apps.

In particular, I'm looking for:

• Layout managers to have a side panel and a top panel 1, 2
• Tables of songs with customizable colums 1, possibly grouped in various ways (group by artist, group by album, etc.) 2, with complex sorts 3, possibly with expanding inline to show album art, artist biography, etc. [4]
• The playlist panel on the left will probably be organized into a tree structure, and perhaps a file system view will also be possible via this tree view 1
• It'd be nice if we could show the metrics we captured on listening habits 1, e.g. plot artists, genre, albums, etc. against time of day, day of week. Perhaps some markov-chain analysis to figure out which song/artist/album/genre goes well after which other song as part of the prediction/suggestion engine, etc.

Finally, I don't know what the UI design would be, but I would like a "query editor" for designing "smart playlists" as seen in iTunes, winamp, etc. Perhaps something like Scratch (although that's designed for imperative languages, instead of query languages).

"Sencha" is not set in stone; whatever tools/framework/whatever you want is fine with me, as long as it gets the job done.