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How is Javascript used within the Spotify desktop application?

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Re: How is Javascript used within the Spotify desktop application?

#21

Post by drdaeman »

ploxiln wrote: post #6
LMAlVvQjSGj wrote: post #4

The Spotify desktop client has seen a massive regression since 2008 or 2009. It's incredible how they managed to make it so unresponsive. Scrolling in a playlist is like playing a game at 10 fps. It's uncomfortable and not worth it. Ads are worse as well. I've seen countless malware ads in the bottom banner.

... but (smart?) developer time is so expensive! and computers are so fast!

I get it's sarcasm, but the problem is that computers are not so fast yet.

Developer vs computer time trade-off works only when software already works reasonably well. Which is not the case.

Re: How is Javascript used within the Spotify desktop application?

#22

Post by conradfr »

madsushi wrote: post #15
LMAlVvQjSGj wrote: post #4

The Spotify desktop client has seen a massive regression since 2008 or 2009. It's incredible how they managed to make it so unresponsive. Scrolling in a playlist is like playing a game at 10 fps. It's uncomfortable and not worth it. Ads are worse as well. I've seen countless malware ads in the bottom banner.

The recent removal of the system tray icon is anti-user. It provided users with easy access to Play/Pause from the system tray, but that meant users spent less time in the app, so the system tray icon was removed completely.

Infuriating. It's 2015 and my Winamp is still more usable than a "new" music player.

Why do they care if I spend more or less time in the app if I'm a premium user, surely that can't be the reason for this regression.

Re: How is Javascript used within the Spotify desktop application?

#23

Post by bbrks »

ly wrote: post #8

I got a HDPI display for my windows machine a few days ago. What I am wondering now is why Spotify doesn't support this? If it runs on chromium, which does support hdpi displays, why doesn't spotify? I have I have to choose for a really small spotify client or a real blurry one. Reading this, it would not seem to hard to make it work. It works fine on OSX.

I can't speak for Windows, but HiDPI Spotify works great on OS X.

http://i.imgur.com/8mGbvnV.png

Re: How is Javascript used within the Spotify desktop application?

#24

Post by baliex »

madsushi wrote: post #15
LMAlVvQjSGj wrote: post #4

The Spotify desktop client has seen a massive regression since 2008 or 2009. It's incredible how they managed to make it so unresponsive. Scrolling in a playlist is like playing a game at 10 fps. It's uncomfortable and not worth it. Ads are worse as well. I've seen countless malware ads in the bottom banner.

The recent removal of the system tray icon is anti-user. It provided users with easy access to Play/Pause from the system tray, but that meant users spent less time in the app, so the system tray icon was removed completely.

This update also removed the Alt+F, X keyboard shortcut I was using to quit from the keyboard. Don't think it's possible to do that any more.

Re: How is Javascript used within the Spotify desktop application?

#25

Post by daheza »

madsushi wrote: post #15
LMAlVvQjSGj wrote: post #4

The Spotify desktop client has seen a massive regression since 2008 or 2009. It's incredible how they managed to make it so unresponsive. Scrolling in a playlist is like playing a game at 10 fps. It's uncomfortable and not worth it. Ads are worse as well. I've seen countless malware ads in the bottom banner.

The recent removal of the system tray icon is anti-user. It provided users with easy access to Play/Pause from the system tray, but that meant users spent less time in the app, so the system tray icon was removed completely.

As someone who switches often between the mac and windows version this kills me. The mac version will continue after closing but the pc version just cuts the music completely.

Re: How is Javascript used within the Spotify desktop application?

#26

Post by touristtam »

GeorgeHahn wrote: post #17

While I'm appalled by some of the recent changes Spotify has made, I'm really impressed by how easy it is to work on their desktop client. I can't even imagine how nice things must be when you have the real source, automatic live-reload, and don't have to muck around with concatenated or minified JS/css/handlebars files. This setup can't be good for memory usage, but it rocks for development! For anyone who's curious…

Maybe that could offer the basis for an alternative client. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. :)

Re: How is Javascript used within the Spotify desktop application?

#28

Post by 91bananas »

wlesieutre wrote: post #18
1_player wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow.. I agree that Spotify isn't the most lightweight application, but it doesn't feel much heavier than, say, Chrome on my Linux installation. Are you on a mechanical hard drive perhaps? The network performance though is quite bad, searching for some song often fails or just is very slow to load and render.

Should a music player be anywhere near as heavy as Chrome? A web browser is a pretty immensely complicated thing (CSS, DOM rendering, Javascript JIT compiler, etc.). Similar criticisms have been made of iTunes over the years (though I find it's not bad in the current version). Things like laggy scrolling are a bit understandable there, since they've defaulted to the grid of album covers view for a while. But Spotify…

I assume this thing is just a web app rendered in their "browser"? So doesn't it need to do all the things you list? Needs css to layout the DOM, needs to parse and execute javascript.

I'm a recent convert from grooveshark, so I've been using the spotlight web player and I find it a pretty nice web app to be honest. I haven't dealt with any of the actual desktop clients yet, so don't know if anything I said above is true.

Re: How is Javascript used within the Spotify desktop application?

#29

Post by StavrosK »

conradfr wrote: post #22
madsushi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent removal of the system tray icon is anti-user. It provided users with easy access to Play/Pause from the system tray, but that meant users spent less time in the app, so the system tray icon was removed completely.

Infuriating. It's 2015 and my Winamp is still more usable than a "new" music player. Why do they care if I spend more or less time in the app if I'm a premium user, surely that can't be the reason for this regression.

Winamp is just the best piece of software ever written, ever. I still lament the fact that it doesn't run properly on Linux.

Re: How is Javascript used within the Spotify desktop application?

#30

Post by mwcampbell »

touristtam wrote: post #26
GeorgeHahn wrote: post #17

While I'm appalled by some of the recent changes Spotify has made, I'm really impressed by how easy it is to work on their desktop client. I can't even imagine how nice things must be when you have the real source, automatic live-reload, and don't have to muck around with concatenated or minified JS/css/handlebars files. This setup can't be good for memory usage, but it rocks for development! For anyone who's curious…

Maybe that could offer the basis for an alternative client. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. :)

An alternative desktop client using libspotify and a non-web GUI toolkit would be much more interesting.
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