Kara-Moon Forum

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

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

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

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

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!

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

idem pour moi

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.

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

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

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

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... ;D

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...

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. :D 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.

 ???
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  :-\


 8)
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

Good - then I have fixed the slow moving issue in IE! ;D 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! ;D

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.

 8)
Marc,
I'm glad you take my comments in the way they were intended ... constructive criticism.

I've just done a check on the latest update. My findings are:
Safari ... perfect
Opera ... slightly jerky transition
Firefox ... a bit slower than the others
IE8 ... still just the static black screen, I'm afraid.  :-[

This is all on Win XP sp3.

 ;)
James

This is a very definite improvement. However for me, Firefox is now faster than Opera  :o
This is working on Ubuntu 10.10

Hi James, of course! I'm a little bit annoyed that it doesn't translate exactly the same to all systems but I suppose it was a bit naive to think that would be the case. :) In any case, I really appreciate all you guys testing the site and having all these different OS's and browsers really helps me a lot! I do think that the problem with IE8 is fixed in IE9 but unfortunately I can't test that. In any case, a big thanks to all of you for testing :; this and I hope to continue using your help - I'll update this thread when I've made further changes!

The thing is that I used Firefox almost exclusively ... but have the other browsers installed for testing purposes when I do my own web-building.
It is often quite surprising the differences between browsers  :o

Always happy to help.

 ;)
James

A small update: I discovered that IE apparently treats the window object differently, which I use to get the width/height of the website. Really weird is that yesterday IE ran this on my pc without problems but today it produced the same problem you guys were reporting for IE. In a way this was a good thing because it helped me home in on the error. It should work now, though it could be that IE reports an error when opening the website. If so, click on ignore and it should run as normal. There was also a difference in the way IE treats variables outside of functions - it appears to ignore them. In any case, thanks to you all I'm learning a lot!

 :-X
I'm afraid that further testing will have to wait until another day  >:(
Internet is being totally crazy today ... it's worse than being back on dial-up.
Don't know what's going on but it did the same thing a couple of days ago  >:(

 ;)
James

Small additional change: I now changed the speed of the cd zooming in/out to be a standard 1 second (although experience with the cd's flying in teaches that this could be a bit longer or shorter depending on the browser. More dramatically, the tracklist now flies in from the left instead of just popping up.

I’m using a 3.06 GHz, 32 bit XP SP3 machine and IE8 with a 1280 x 1024 pixel 25” monitor. The monitor is in VGA mode for this computer. It takes 35 seconds for the animation to complete.  Also the animation is very jerky and when the album covers reach the right side of the screen they are very very small, i.e. impossible to read. 

Does this information help?

Could be either the processor or IE8. The smoothest playback I get is in Chrome, would you mind installing that to see if it's IE8? On my laptop, both Chrome and IE9 are smooth. Firefox is a bit jerkier but ok as well.

My set up is even older.
AMD 3000 1.8Ghz w 2G ram, dual 19" monitors on 1024x768    :o

Opera 11.6   gives full animation in 3 sec
Safari 5.1     gives full animation in 3 sec with jerky transition
Firefox 9      gives full animation in 4 sec
IE 8            gives full animation in 17 sec and is so jerky it looks like the boxes are walking  :-X

 ;)
James

added ... installed Chrome 16 and this gives the animation in slightly over 2 sec.

Thank you for the feedback! I don't know that browser but from what you say I would guess that either it doesn't use Java or you disabled it. Could that be the case?

A new change to the 87PM website! The individual previews (which open when you click on one of the cd covers to the right) now use the built-in HTML5 audio player. This means that playback is much more integrated and doesn't open the system's own audio player. I've tested it on several browsers so far but as usual, I was hoping you'd help me test this on a few other systems. Thanks in advance! :D

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

I should remark that any java-related problems described earlier in this thread will probably still remain, that's an on-going issue. I am however interested in whether the previews play back properly. Using java, I've programmed this behaviour for them:

- Clicking on the track name plays back the file. It also changed the track name's colour to red.
- Clicking on another track name stops playback of the previous file and starts the clicked file.
- Clicking on the track name of a running track stops playback.

If you are using a non-HTML5 compatible browser that doesn't have the audio object, it should show a normal link to the preview mp3 which will open and play back on your system's audio player, like before.

Marc,

Made quick tests in FireFox, GoogleChrome, Opera, Safari and IE.

All worked perfectly in FF and Chrome.
In Opera all worked well but animations were a bit stuttering.
In Safari the links worked well but animations were very slow.
In IE everything was awful. Animations just crept across the page and in-built music player didn't work. It referred back to Quicktime. In saying this I won't have an up to date IE on my system. I just keep an old (safer) version for testing purposes.

Hope this helps, mate.  ;D

 ;)
James

Hi James,

Thanks for the tests! Really useful information. The new IE in Win7 does work fine, but apparently the old java script and html5 support leaves a lot to be desired. :D I'm kind of surprised that the Safari animations are slow as the iOS Safari browser on my iPad works perfectly. Anyway, it's good to see that Chrome and FF work well already.

Cheers,

Marc

Slightly different here.
Running debian wheezy.
Opera 12 ran as James found. A bit slow and jerky with the animation but fine with the sound.
Firefox 14 ran very smoothly but although the player seemed to operate there was no sound at all !?

I’m using IE8 on a 32 bit Win XP SP3 system.  The animation was jerky but not painfully slow, just slow. I could click on an album title as soon as it appeared then click on a song but the song would not start until the two album covers finished their journey across my screen.

Thanks Folderol and Mario! Seems the html5 standard has still a little way to go. Nevertheless, I do like the functionality it offers so we'll see what I can do...

I'm running Windows 7(64bit 2.80Ghz SP1),using Google Chrome and everything is running smoothly & expeditiously.Beautifully designed website by the way....cool stuff! 8)


-Thom

Thanks Thom! :-