New Design for userinterface

Is kJams missing a feature you need? Post it here! Note: if iTunes has it but kJams doesn't, it's a good bet kJams will have it, but that I just haven't gotten around to it yet. But go ahead and request it anyway!
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leo-magic
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New Design for userinterface

Post by leo-magic »

Hi dave,

KJams is great but one thing that makes it "not modern" is the userinterface-design. Do you have any plans to modenize the userinterface, like the actual iTunes version? The task-window could also move into the top section of the main window (like iTunes)...

I think a more modern look and feel would would provide a much better user-experience.

Thanks,
Léo

dave
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Re: New Design for userinterface

Post by dave »

i'd love to do that, but i'm just one guy, and i have much much bigger fish to fry at the moment. if someone is a coder and would like to volunteer, however.... :)

frede
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Re: New Design for userinterface

Post by frede »

"Night" mode would be a modern and simple update to the user interface, that would be very useful. Just add a toggle so we can switch betwen the light background/dark foreground to a dark background/light foreground. Much easier on the eyes in a dark night time environment like a club or bar. To get an idea how this would look, just check out any DJ program.

dave
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Re: New Design for userinterface

Post by dave »

i understand what you're asking for.

however, what may seem simple to a non-coder may not actually translate to "simple" for the guy writing the code.

in this case, it would be probably a couple weeks of full time work to enable "dark mode", on both mac and windows, and get all the bugs out. that's about 80 hours. however, i only work on kjams 2 days a week for 4 hours each time. so it would take 2 and a half months of my available time, away from other, seemingly much more important things.

believe me i'd LIKE to do it, but when i prioritize this feature request against all the other things i am working on, it just doesn't get very high up on the list. now, if a dozen people chimed in on this thread and said "no, dave, you totally have to do this, we all want it", that would change my priorities.

frede
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Re: New Design for userinterface

Post by frede »

Sounds fair

DeusExMachina
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Re: New Design for userinterface

Post by DeusExMachina »

Just as an experiment, I tried changing some of the png resources in the pictures file in the application bundle (metal-active.png) but saw no change to the app on relaunch. Was thinking it might get a quick and dirty change, but nothing.

dave
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Re: New Design for userinterface

Post by dave »

:(

jtara
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Re: New Design for userinterface

Post by jtara »

I suspect you can experiment with a new website yourself. (e.g. assuming you have kJams).

kJams server serves-up a page that is basically a SPA. It uses Ajax to read XML from the server.

You can just make new HTML/CSS/JS that uses Ajax to read XML from the server. So long as the server sends a header to say that cross-site-scripting is okey-dokey. Then you can just load that new HTML/CSS/JS from desktop files, or a local server. then you can develop and test your own, brand-new kJams web "front end".

While I hate client-side MVCs, this just might be a job for a client-side MVC. So, if anybody has a fascination with Backbone, Knockout, AngularJS.... have at it!

Dave, does/should kJams server care about cross-site scripting? Would this be an awful header for any reason?

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Even without the header, you can change a Chrome setting to allow it anyway.

Maybe even that is not needed. Can users just drop some pages into the server? I suppose they can, right, it would be silly and even a big strange if not.

With the header, though, or with Chrome (or whatever browser) XSS-checking disabled, then where you do have a kiosk on a completely separate computer, then that kiosk might have it's own custom web page(s) for interacting with kJams.

Any web developers want to take a shot at it?

DeusExMachina
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Re: New Design for userinterface

Post by DeusExMachina »

Jon, I think the O.P. is talking about changing the UI of the kJams app itself, from the current faux iTunes interface (an ancient version of iTunes, at that) to something more like, say Traktor or Serato.

P.S. The server pages are readily editable. They are copied from the app bundle to ~/Library/Preferences/kJams/server on first install and can be edited from there to change the web page any way you'd like. I have posted numerous code modifications to the *Code section of this site (and many changes I made previously are now in the canonical release). I have reserved a number of the more esoteric changes I made for my own personal use.
All HTML, CSS, and JS files are found there.

jtara
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Re: New Design for userinterface

Post by jtara »

Oh. Application UI, not server UI. Got it.

Sorry for confusing anyone!

Good to know that the server pages can be easily changed, though.


dave
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Re: New Design for userinterface

Post by dave »

8)

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