New frontend?

[jverheye]

Hi

I'm a Subsonic user, and I was wondering if there ever will be plans to create a completely new web interface?

The current web interface is functional but (in my opinion) not very attractive.

Maybe there could be set up a team to do that? I'm also thinking of a couple of new features linked to that:

- Mobile web interface
- 'Party' mode where users can request songs and vote to them

Jeroen

[mr_nobody]

Minisub already ships with 4.7...have you checked that out?

[jverheye]

I'm really thinking of a completely new web interface, not an app that's limited to some kind of browser.

All the apps have limited functionality, because you can't do everything via the API. And there's no app that I really like, besides iSub.

[hakko]

If you have good ideas on a completely new layout, feel free to submit drawings / screenshots / HTML for what it could look like.

[iwill]

I'd say that this is a great idea, in general.
The use of frames/Flash in the current version isn't ideal... I think that MiniSub is actually a great start but it still leaves much to be desired.

[hakko]

Your post is a good start but it leaves a lot to be desired, too. Why not contribute some ideas for new features? If you use another media player with an awesome interface, why not at least post some screenshots as inspiration?

If you present something here that can actually be discussed and implemented, chances are much higher that it'll happen than if you just post "I want somebody else to spend their spare time writing a new interface for me for free".

[iwill]

I want somebody else to spend their spare time writing a new interface for me for free

Obviously that wasn't what I was suggesting... no need to be dramatic.

My brief previous post was just meant to +1 the idea and to show my general support for this. I think that the interface for MiniSub is an excellent interface to Subsonic but since it relies on the API, it's obviously missing many of the more advanced subsonic controls. It's just an app at the moment but it provides an interesting inspiration for the direction that the native interface could take. Personally, I think that specific colors/theming of the interface is less important and I'd be most interested in:

Moving away from the use of frames
Depending on window resolution it can become cumbersome to use the web ui
Utilizing the advanced HTML5 media features rather than flash

[jverheye]

I'm sorry for the late reply.
It's not that I don't want to contribute. I'm a Java Developer myself, but I'm not an UI expert.
Though with things like Twitter Bootstrap, you can achieve nice things without being an designer.
I think that there are enough nice examples of nice UI's for media players. My top:

1. Spotify
2. iTunes
3. Songbird
4. Subsonic

+1 for the proposal of HTML5 instead of Frames and HTML 4.01. I think this is really essential to the surviving of SubSonic.
It would also be nice to be able to extend the UI via 'add-ins' or 'plug-ins' written in JavaScript/HTML5/Java

[audioscavenger]

Why not starting smoothly by integrating div+iframe ?
This solution would involve only the modification of index.jsp + many of the css inside /style (the themes, mostly)

This post is a duplicate to another one, but as hakko said, people are free to help the project, so I'd say I'm motivated to modify it this way, as a starting point. I got some skills in js/html/php/jquery/css

About HTML5, Subsonic integrates a version 5.10 of flash jwplayer, which I replaced by the version 6 with no issue. This version can also be embeded in JS for an even better integration of videos, but that's not what I'm interested in for Subsonic.

[off topic] From my point of view, a video media player cannot be a music media player. Handle of massive music files organized by albums/artists/genres/title and so is far different from a video collection which has not the same needs. Also, videos cannot be organized like that because of the lack of an identical tag system accross the formats, as for mp3/m4a[/off topic]

Also, I would like to see in the frontend a 3 column pane showing [artist|album|genre] to select songs the way of the very old version of iTunes or almost like in the media library of Winamp... something like that : (abandoned streampad web ui)

would it be possible ?

[joost]

Love subsonic. New frontend would be wonderfull. Something that looks more 2012..

I would love a website with the looks of for instance the spotify web player, with an HTML5 player, but more usefull then that. Not such a mess

The layout and functions of the current frontend are just perfect...!

Cheers