Roadmap required for long term support of Mobile Flat-UI Theme

[jcass77]

I think we will eventually have to look at creating a new theme for Mopidy-Musicbox-Webclient. It currently makes use of jQuery Mobile Flat-UI Theme, which hasn't been maintained in about a year.

The theme also only supports jQuery 1.3.1 or earlier, which was released on 10 April 2013.

As new devices and operating systems are released, it is likely that more and more things will break as technology moves on. So getting onto some sort of viable upgrade path longer term to avoid having to maintain all of the libraries ourselves will become a priority at some point.

Some notes and considerations on moving forward:

• whatever changes we make in this area, it should continue to maintain the project ethos of simplicity and usability that was established by Wouter and which made Musicbox so popular.
• a lot of people really like Mopidy-Musicbox-Webclient, so reusing all of the best elements of the look & feel and user interaction model is probably the way to go.
• since merging this will be a lot of work, any changes should just be focussed on the theme elements as a start, and not change any of the underlying functionality.
• ideally we would be using something that is as close to a standard framework as possible, with tools that will allow us to upgrade the theme with little or no effort on our part (using something like ThemeRoller perhaps?)

[jcass77]

Just saw that jQuery Mobile is finally getting an update.

It might make sense to convert to one of the standard themes when version 1.5 is released, so that we can automate upgrades using ThemeRoller in future and make it easier for people do do things like #89.

The downside is that we will lose support for some of the older browser versions, but that is probably something that we can live with?

[jcass77]

Things aren't going well for the jquery-mobile project unfortunately: http://blog.jquerymobile.com/2017/12/21/the-future-of-jquery-ui-and-jquery-mobile/

Let's hope that it can be resuscitated but it has been years since a stable release has been made.