This is an amazing rewrite from the Flash version - well worth the time they put into this one. They have some really dedicated staff members and some great talent on the team.
It's nice and probably uses way less system resources, but it definitely isn't as "polished" as the Flash version was. Not sure if that's a limitation of the HTML5/JS/CSS combo or if they just need to work on it more. It's mostly just little things, like missing visual fade transitions or a UI that doesn't look like it's been repeatedly bleached. But they add up to a noticeable difference, I think--the HTML5 app just isn't as vibrant.
That being said, I always thought their Flash app was amazingly slick and polished, so it's a tough act to follow I suppose.
EDIT: Plus if they are going to go this far with HTML5 it'd be awesome if they could cut the Flash cord entirely. Not sure if that's technically possible though.
Funny thing - everything works amazingly, until I turn Flashblock on http://i.imgur.com/HFe8h.png then all my stuff disappears (favs, playlists) and this js error hangs my firefox to death.
Besides that, it's awesome, even better than before.
I once tried to convince a medium-sized employer, someone who got significant traffic, to support Opera. They looked up the numbers and had 7 visitors who'd used Opera in the preceding month. They just couldn't justify the expense for such an insignificant percentage of traffic. I think that's going to be your problem everywhere.
The only reason to support Opera is personal good feelings toward Opera. The userbase is insignificant, Opera doesn't further any given political goal as they aren't open-source and they are several more-popular open-source browsers in the market that are tested against. So what's the point of supporting Opera other than just liking Opera and wanting it to be usable with your site? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but rarely is it a cost-efficient procedure.
We will support Opera, we just didn't have time to test it in Opera before release and didn't want to claim it worked without that.
I've tried it in Opera, and it's perfectly usable apart from some weird scrolling issues where you can scroll the whole site off the page, and sometimes Opera doesn't seem to want to redraw some items in the songlists without scrolling a bit.
Just click the "Let's take a chance" button when the browser compatibility lightbox opens and the site will let you in.
You can't blame projects for not immediately supporting your specific browser. Most teams develop for the standards. If your browser doesn't conform to the standards that work for major browsers, then it's just harder on the developers.
How come the RIAA is okay with Grooveshark streaming any music at any time? Pandora has many more restrictions in their free version to qualify for "internet radio" licensing rates.
I'm pretty sure there's a legal loophole occurring here. All of the music on Grooveshark.com is uploaded by the users and Grooveshark is not responsible for the content. If the song is copyright it's user who broke the law, not Grooveshark. It's a similar concept to copyright videos on Youtube.
This an awesome step for Grooveshark. Now let the greasemonkey or chrome extension customization scripts begin. Would love to see, what users come up with. I already coded new ad remover for my self. Couple ideas I have are as follows,
1. Last.fm scrobbler
2. Lyrics plugin (same as winamp has)
3. put 'now playing' list at the right sidebar
3. make 'now playing' list thinner.
etc.
I am a big big fan of grooveshark. I work in a user interface team for a large blue chip company. The amount of work, time, dedication, motivation that goes into developing an intuitive user interface is huge. This guys just make it look as if it was a breeze.... If you could do a blog post as you have done on the architecture part, it will be great :).
Source? (EDIT: Nevermind, I see the GS devs on here mentioning it)
As a project lead at my last job I championed jmvc for a new project. We had mostly good results but there was always a couple developers who were against it (and who IMO worked to undermine it).
We were building a very ajax-heavy UI for an Ad network. Think.. Adwords UI meets MailChimp UI.
In our case, my biggest worry was how easy it is to write spaghetti JS. A classic example is a page with several JS includes and they all are binding to the same event (or to different events on the same element). You're in one file working and you have funny results and you only then discover the event handlers in the other file and then you have to refactor the whole mess. We actually had that a lot in a previous project.
Also, 2 things jmvc did that excited me:
1. Easier JS unit tests.
2. Fixtures! You can build and test the JS without relying on the server to send you the json you need.
Fantastic -- I'm a Grooveshark VIP member and have been since shortly after launch. I still think it was one of the best investments I've made in the past couple years -- it's completely changed how I listen to music (especially with the mobile versions).
I wish you guys the best of luck and thank you sincerely for continuing to innovate.
One thing I noticed is now the ad blocker (on Chrome) catches the ads and doesn't show them. Since I don't have a VIP account with them and the ads aren't as intrusive as Pandora/Last.fm services, I decided to whitelist listen.grooveshark.com to show ads.
It works beautifully though, Flash on Linux was such a pain.
As far as I can tell, it's written with PHP serverside, Javascript (jQuery JMVC) and HTML/CSS. The actual music player is a hidden flash widget, but the song selection, playback, and entire interface is in HTML/CSS not Adobe flash as previously. (And the adobe flash version had horrible performance on linux).
I visited Grooveshark just yesterday, and I just thought it was a flash rewrite. I did like the theme a lot, but the only sad part was my playlist was gone >:( (didn't have an account, it was just saved as cookie or whatever)
Never used GrooveShark before but this is pretty cool. Wonder why they don't have playlist ratings though (as far as I can tell)? When I do a search for playlists I'd like to see what other people thought of them before I click through each one.
This is a totally opaque interface that hardly works at all as far as I can see. Completely uninformative, dumb, not functional in any real way. What is going on? Why do all these other think it is great? It is not.
I would be interested why this is what did it for you? I work at Rdio, which is a competitor that has been HTML/JS/CSS with a flash player since the beginning. What about this makes you like Grooveshark more?
I've spent a couple of minutes searching for 'My Music' and 'Favorites' lists. Just click on your username and they are in menu bar left to the search field. Beside that, great interface and fast loading.
[+] [-] invisible|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shock-value|15 years ago|reply
That being said, I always thought their Flash app was amazingly slick and polished, so it's a tough act to follow I suppose.
EDIT: Plus if they are going to go this far with HTML5 it'd be awesome if they could cut the Flash cord entirely. Not sure if that's technically possible though.
[+] [-] zalew|15 years ago|reply
Besides that, it's awesome, even better than before.
[+] [-] tycoffee|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j2d2j2d2|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantsquid|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] asnyder|15 years ago|reply
Update: Come on there's no reason to downvote this. At least explain why you're downvoting this, for example, Opera killed your puppy.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|15 years ago|reply
The only reason to support Opera is personal good feelings toward Opera. The userbase is insignificant, Opera doesn't further any given political goal as they aren't open-source and they are several more-popular open-source browsers in the market that are tested against. So what's the point of supporting Opera other than just liking Opera and wanting it to be usable with your site? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but rarely is it a cost-efficient procedure.
[+] [-] cowpewter|15 years ago|reply
I've tried it in Opera, and it's perfectly usable apart from some weird scrolling issues where you can scroll the whole site off the page, and sometimes Opera doesn't seem to want to redraw some items in the songlists without scrolling a bit.
Just click the "Let's take a chance" button when the browser compatibility lightbox opens and the site will let you in.
[+] [-] foobarbazoo|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] robinduckett|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jamesbritt|15 years ago|reply
edit: just tried the site in Firefox ; can't even get the sign-in form to react. :(
Seems OK in Chrome, but at least the Flash version worked in FF for me.
[+] [-] giantsquid|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kuldeep_kap|15 years ago|reply
1. Last.fm scrobbler 2. Lyrics plugin (same as winamp has) 3. put 'now playing' list at the right sidebar 3. make 'now playing' list thinner. etc.
[+] [-] sundarurfriend|15 years ago|reply
Shhhh... Don't make them regret doing it. :)
[+] [-] tech_and_beyond|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HaloZero|15 years ago|reply
How was JVMC? Was it very useful using the MVC format in your JS, did you end up using it mainly for classes or did you do the whole MVC format?
Why JMVC over something like Backbone?
A write up on this in a blog would be awesome.
Was Javascript templating useful? It seems to be me that it would be very slow (though faster than doing async request to servers I suppose).
[+] [-] encoderer|15 years ago|reply
As a project lead at my last job I championed jmvc for a new project. We had mostly good results but there was always a couple developers who were against it (and who IMO worked to undermine it).
We were building a very ajax-heavy UI for an Ad network. Think.. Adwords UI meets MailChimp UI.
In our case, my biggest worry was how easy it is to write spaghetti JS. A classic example is a page with several JS includes and they all are binding to the same event (or to different events on the same element). You're in one file working and you have funny results and you only then discover the event handlers in the other file and then you have to refactor the whole mess. We actually had that a lot in a previous project.
Also, 2 things jmvc did that excited me:
1. Easier JS unit tests. 2. Fixtures! You can build and test the JS without relying on the server to send you the json you need.
[+] [-] Locke1689|15 years ago|reply
I wish you guys the best of luck and thank you sincerely for continuing to innovate.
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