Feedback on a US Spotify UI (that works!)

[ntrstngftrmth]

@arlorose sorry for the radio silence! I didn't see the notification about this thread. I'll be trying it on my way home in a few!

 

[arlorose]

It also supports websockets, so might be worth looking in that. I think it might even support server events, but can't remember of the top of my head.

Yeah, but Spotify doesn't support any kind of socket or push on track change with their web API.

I've been on a business trip. I'll resume when I get home Friday.

 

[Spifl]

Hey there-

Just checking in to see if any more work has been done on this. I'd love to try it out.

 

[herbdierks]

I was thinking the same thing - if only I could control the Spotify instance on my phone from the screen in my Model S. I looked around and was surprised that this was the only project that I could find along these lines. It's a cool start, but lacks the functionality that I desire. So I took a stab at writing one too.

Anyone on this thread want to test out another project attempting to accomplish the same thing? I'd love some feedback. Here's the URL:
T-Spot

As suggested, I used LocalStorage to store the ID (great idea!) and I was able to work in playlists, search, etc.

It still needs some more robust error trapping, a more user-friendly setup process, and the ability to add/remove tracks, artists, etc from playlists - but it's a start. What do you think? What's the biggest missing feature?

Let me know!

Thanks,
Herb

 

[arlorose]

I gave up on mine after only 2 people signed up, I got a couple of HomePods and gave up on Spotify.

Glad to see someone has carried the torch!

Herb, if you want any help or feedback, let me know.

 

[ivolodin]

A bit of feedback:
Overall it works very wall. UI seems to be snappy and responsive. Couple of things to improve on:

• When selecting a song that's part of the album, it currently only plays the selected song, but stops right after that. It would be nice if it would continue to play the album.
• After navigating to the album from search, there doesn't seem to be a way to get back (other then to select the search tab again).
• Songs with long titles have title cut of by the "Album" and "Artist" buttons
• Unfortunately, I wasn't able to test actually playing music in the car, since as soon as I launched the website in the car, and queued up a song, it started playing for about 2 seconds before pausing it. Went back to my computer, and everything seems to be working just fine. Both car and my phone were on WiFi signal, so it wasn't network problems.
• Also noticed that pause/play button doesn't update it state consistently.
• UI in general looks a bit dated, something close to what Tesla UI used to look like before initial refresh.

 

[SpudLime]

Just here to follow progress.

 

[herbdierks]

@arlorose - Thank you! Any feedback is very much appreciated.

@ivolodin - Great feedback. I'll dig into some of these issues this weekend. Design is not my forte. I'll try to tone down the gradients. That might help with performance anyway. It seems to work fine on a desktop, but the Tesla browser is so under powered - this is even more of a challenge for streamlining than back-gen mobile.

 

[ivolodin]

Here's another suggestion, I was planning on testing it out at some point, but never got around to doing it. On the first load, download all of the client-side JS files and put it into a local storage. Then let people bookmark the url that contains bookmarklet that just executes the code from local storage directly. Should significantly improve the first-time load performance, because the app is basically installed locally.