New 87PM website

[Marc JX8P]

Right - I can no longer sit on this even though it's not yet complete...

http://ocean-coast.kara-moon.com/

This is our new website. I'm really excited about this as I've employed some new techniques to create a dynamic looking site with cross-browser compatibility. As such, I've avoided using Flash and other stuff that requires plugins and used Javascript, AJAX and XML. Very fun to learn about even though it did cost me several hours of frustrated debugging.

In any case, it should work on all javascript-enabled browsers and all platforms, even mobile ones. Don't forget to click on the album icons! I'd really appreciate it if you all gave it a test and reported back here on how it looked or whether there were problems. Please also state the browser/platform. Thanks!

Things that will be changed is the tracklist: I'm not entirely happy with its location and how it appears/disappears.

Marc

Edit: I've now sped up the movement of the cd's at the opening/refresh of the website. It should now also be constant, no matter how wide the window actually is. The movement from left to right is now set in 400 steps of 5 milliseconds (thus a 2 second travel time) but I may play around with it to move in less steps if that improves performance. I will keep the 2 second time though, I think, as shorter really seems to fast to me while slower does impede - like James very correctly says - the access to the music.

[offthewall]

Firefox on WinXPsp3

Sorry Marc ..... just a black screen with a small logo on the left. Nothing to click and no nav bars.
See screen grab.

 
James

[Marc JX8P]

Thank you! Seems like Firefox is pickier than IE, Chrome and Safari when it comes to Javascript. I'll debug it.

[offthewall]

Marc
I just came back and tested in Opera, Safari and IE.  It was fine in Op and Saf but in IE it loaded extremely slowly with the album logos creeping across the screen at a snail pace.

Hope this helps.

 
James

[MarioD]

Marc
I just came back and tested in Opera, Safari and IE.  It was fine in Op and Saf but in IE it loaded extremely slowly with the album logos creeping across the screen at a snail pace.

Hope this helps.

 
James

I had the same experience here using IE8.  Extremely slow load time, in minutes!

[Marc JX8P]

Thanks guys! Strange that there is so much difference between these Java engines... But it should all be fixable.

[Azell]

Firefox on WinXPsp3

Sorry Marc ..... just a black screen with a small logo on the left. Nothing to click and no nav bars.
See screen grab.

 
James

idem pour moi

[Marc JX8P]

I can reproduce the Firefox problem as well as the IE one, so that helps. Thanks for testing all, guess it's back to the code for me. It should work fine in Chrome and Safari though.

[bvdp]

Firefox 9.0.1 on Linux. I get a half globe on the left side of totally black screen.

[elwoodblues1969]

I mainly use Chrome and everything is fine.Occasionally,I use IE if need be...but I try to adhere to Chrome whenever I can,as it provides the best protection & it gives me far less problems than Firefox.

There doesn't seem to be a single web browser that will provide universal compatibility,but Chrome has proved to be the most useful...but I don't mind trading off on web browsers on occasion.

Nice website...will be interested to see it when it's completed.


-Thom

[folderol]

Just want to say I get the same result as James. OK on Opera, not on Firefox

[Marc JX8P]

Thanks all for helping me test this. Nothing like a field test, I always say!

From what I gather from Firefox's debug log the problem is mostly that it demands that the code is constructed a little different - I would say that it doesn't seem to adhere to the standard javascript but I don't think Mozilla will change that just for our website...

More worrying is the speed of IE; however on my Win7 PC in IE9 it went very smooth. In any case, I'm going to change that animation a bit as currently the time it takes is dependent on the distance it has to travel: basically it measures the distance in pixels between two point and then travels that with a speed of two pixels or so per time interval. I need to decide a fixed time amount and steps, and then use that as a factor for the actual distance it has to travel. In any case, it should be interesting...

[Marc JX8P]

Alright - it should work fine in Firefox now. Did some debugging and the main issue seems to be that the js engine in Firefox doesn't know the window object that I used to compute the size and position of the graphics. I found another object though that was as informative and which does work in Chrome as well as FF and this is now in place. FF also kept moaning about some object naming conventions which didn't prohibit the site running but which I fixed nevertheless, just to shut it up. I have to say though that the built in error reporting console was very informative and made debugging very easy to do. So: now I need to think a bit about how to move those objects more efficiently.

[offthewall]

 
Marc,
I just did a quick test again.
It now works, as you say, in Firefox, Opera and Safari .... IE now has it doing exactly what Firefox did the first time .... nothing 


 
Just my 'old fashioned' opinion .... I don't like all these moving elements. They always smack of amateurishness to my mind.
I do a lot of hanging out at a web-design forum and a whole bunch of designers tend to have a similar opinion.
To me ... I think the musical content should be the attraction. If a visitor has to wait for stuff to go floating across the screen he will quite often just go elsewhere. 

Just my opinion, of course. I hate to see anyone wasting their time without good reason.

 
James

[Marc JX8P]

Marc,
I just did a quick test again.
It now works, as you say, in Firefox, Opera and Safari .... IE now has it doing exactly what Firefox did the first time .... nothing  

Good - then I have fixed the slow moving issue in IE! It's strange though, I tried it just now and both the 64 bit and the normal IE 9 versions in Win7 have no problems. So it could be an XP issue. I can't debug that now but I'll keep it in mind. What IE version are you using btw?

Design is always an issue of different tastes. I did want to make the website this time a bit more dynamic; I do think our type of music invokes a visual element so I'll stick with it for now. Still, I appreciate the comment - I don't want to go overboard on it and make it a jukebox!

On a more serious note: this is absolutely no waste of time; I'm a programmer by profession so this is an excellent test case, even if I later would drop half of it.

Edit: I've now sped up the movement of the cd's at the opening/refresh of the website. It should now also be constant, no matter how wide the window actually is. The movement from left to right is now set in 400 steps of 5 milliseconds (thus a 2 second travel time) but I may play around with it to move in less steps if that improves performance. I will keep the 2 second time though, I think, as shorter really seems to fast to me while slower does impede - like James very correctly says - the access to the music.