[SOLVED] Ongoing status updates with new UI for Gear Isolation

[agent_kith]

I just have checked out the demo, and I don't want to sound ungrateful for all the hard work that you've put into the new GUI, but I find your old one much better visually.
I think that the new Dashboard icons (wizard, networking, disk, player, etc) are redundant and not sitting well with the rest of the design, since they are not sharing the same visual style. They are too big and too colorful.

Yeah. I agree with the icons. They look "good" for about 5 seconds, then kind of gets in the way. The idea is to have something big to click on, but it's an issue to fill up that space. Will try and see how to improve on that.

Also, the old design has much better responsive design, that responds to changes in browser width by adjusting the placement of design elements to fit in the available space.
I'm affraid that he new GUI will not fit as good in vertical mode in web browsers on some mobile phones, and that some parts of the interface will be cut off.

This is supposed to be responsive also. I have no idea what happened but the width detection is broken now. So the cards no longer resize properly. Hopefully I can find a way to fix it, otherwise I will just do a second template. Shouldn't be too hard to fix.

I really appreciate the progress you are making on the functional side of the GUI, but the visual side of things is not as polished and proffessional looking as your old design.
Some of the audiophile crowd are spoiled, and they will not appreciate the great and unique tweaking features Snakoil has as much as they will appreciate the ease of handling, the sleek user interface and polished user experience.
I'm recommending Snakeoil to all of my friends, but the majority of them are not able to install it by themselves. They are lost with the latest version especially - WinSCP and SSH are too much for them.
Please take my criticism as my desire for Snakeoil OS to take its rightful place along with the rest of the competing software like Volumio and others.

The installer unfortunately is a compromise I had to make. Time on this project is really a luxury. Right now I just don't have enough support to make this a full time gig.

There are always folks who want Wifi, or a kernel with this feature and that. The highly tuned kernel while sounds extremely good, it doesn't work by default on some systems. And audiophiles are indeed spoiled, a few issues here and there and they will simply trash Snakeoil OS and post negative comments on forums.

At the end of the day, while I can spend 300 hours over a month to make Snakeoil OS better, I fully understand there will be some audiophiles who cannot bear to spend even 30 seconds to try and understand how it works. It's the way the world works and I have fully accepted that at this stage. For folks who likes simplicity, there's always Snakeoil 1.1.0 to fall back on. That still sounds excellent.

Snakeoil is a unique product, in the sense it doesn't compete with anything else on the market. It's only "competition" is the audiophile himself. Given the flexibility of the tweaks, the audio quality of Snakeoil can sound sublime, to utter horrible. So in essence the better the audiophile, the better they can extract Snakeoil out of it. It's something that will take time, a relationship the audiophile has to develop with the OS, and not instant gratification with most other products out there.

[agent_kith]

It would be great if it is possible to keep the old GUI layout (and design!) with the dashboard that has a fixed vertical zone on the left side with all of the icons that are available all the time.
It is much easier and more efficient to switch wizard, network, player, etc, pages with one click of the mouse, than being forced to click the "back to dashboard" button every time you wish to change the page.
And the old icons are so much better! The new ones feel dated and they simply do not belong to the rest of the design.

as mentioned in one of the earlier posts, the big icons are just placeholders :p.. I'll do something about that closer to release date.

For me there is no competition between the old and the new GUI, the old is so much better with more logical layout, with the icons on the left side:

That's a good point. The reason why I removed that is for a future feature snakeoil is heading. Reality is that is still some time away yet .. I'll add that side navigation panel back (probably in one of the later alphas), Keep the suggestions coming.

Might not be able to implement all the UI changes in 1.2.2, as I want to begin work on expanding the dynamic kernel builder functionality. Will definitely return back to the GUI development and improve the user experience once kernel builder is complete (i.e. 1.2.4+ onwards).

[patricia1066]

In the meantime, I have built the demo code and it's now live at https://demo.snakeoil-os.net. Go check it out, and let me know what you think. Might not look like much but there's a lot of changes/improvements under the hood, >300 hours are spent on this GUI and updating it to the latest Angular 12.

Looks good and appreciate the effort to update the GUI and especially the underlying technology.  It was a costly (in time) effort, but I suspect, a necessary step that has to be paid to ensure that SnakeOil stays up to date.

Ran successfully on Firefox on Win laptop and landscape mode on Chrome on Samsung Android phone.  In portrait mode on phone, it does not display "icons" and therefore cannot access rest of system.

Looking forward to Alpha...

I tested it on my iPhone SE iOS 15. The icons are not showing but click through is working well. 

I like the zone tab, looking forward to testing this. If you want contributions to the wiki I can prepare screenshots and text. 

I will check it out on desktop later. 

Thanks for your attention to detail for the app, it's really appreciated.

This is the iPhone view of the demo dashboard.

[agent_kith]

I tested it on my iPhone SE iOS 15. The icons are not showing but click through is working well. 

It's still not supposed to look like that. I have no idea why yet, but hopefully will get some time to look into this.

This is how the app is supposed to look like. At least it's running like when I run it here, but when I publish it to demo.snakeoil-os.net, something is broken. I believe it's Cloudflare proxy.. So will have to try and tweak some of the options, what I don't know yet.



So really there should also be a blank space on the right. Should I do one button per row, or two? Thoughts?
 

I like the zone tab, looking forward to testing this. If you want contributions to the wiki I can prepare screenshots and text. 

Always happy to have more contributors helping out. Have sent you a wiki invite. Let me know if you received that or not (as I'm still testing the email system on the wiki system).

[agent_kith]

That feature above about how buttons and cards are sized is called "Responsive". Not entirely sure why it's broken on small screens now, but looks like I will have to spend a bit of time to dig down the cause...

In summary, I think the following sums it up - #FML.

[patricia1066]

I tested it on my iPhone SE iOS 15. The icons are not showing but click through is working well. 

It's still not supposed to look like that. I have no idea why yet, but hopefully will get some time to look into this.

This is how the app is supposed to look like. At least it's running like when I run it here, but when I publish it to demo.snakeoil-os.net, something is broken. I believe it's Cloudflare proxy.. So will have to try and tweak some of the options, what I don't know yet.



So really there should also be a blank space on the right. Should I do one button per row, or two? Thoughts?
 

I like the zone tab, looking forward to testing this. If you want contributions to the wiki I can prepare screenshots and text. 

Always happy to have more contributors helping out. Have sent you a wiki invite. Let me know if you received that or not (as I'm still testing the email system on the wiki system).

I like one column button on the portrait view on iPhone SE, but not on the 6.5 in screen of an android smartphone.

I think it would be hard to have legible text inside the button on a narrow screen with more than one button per row. 

On a larger android smartphone two buttons fit better on portrait view, with one button per row the proportion is wrong. Touch control works far better on landscape as three buttons across looks good and the spacing allows for big fingers.

 I'll log on with the 6.5in phone to upload a few screenshots. 

I received the wiki invitation thanks

---

Screenshot from Xiaomi redmi 10 6.5 in screen.
The first one is landscape and misses the file upload area which is up further.

---

On iPhone se portrait and landscape the dashboard is broken but click through works. System command on landscape looks good today.
The portrait view doesn't look like your screenshot, and my screenshot are a faithful representation of what I see.

[agent_kith]

I like one column button on the portrait view on iPhone SE, but not on the 6.5 in screen of an android smartphone.

I think it would be hard to have legible text inside the button on a narrow screen with more than one button per row. 

On a larger android smartphone two buttons fit better on portrait view, with one button per row the proportion is wrong. Touch control works far better on landscape as three buttons across looks good and the spacing allows for big fingers.

Yeah, agreed. Will fine tune the layout once I fixed the responsive view, and released the alpha.. Really hope to do an alpha this weekend, just hope I can find out what the underlying issue is (there are no errors making this incredibly tedious to trace through).

[agent_kith]

Good news is managed to fix responsive layout ... Bad news, going to get ready for work soon so that'll probably be it for the day as I have other commitments later tonight.

After a few tries of trying to fix the code, decided to just upgrade bootstrap to the latest version 5.1.3, and viola, that version worked with Angular 12 now (And overall things seem to feel faster!).
In hindsight I should have just done this from the get go and save me 2 hours of messing around ... Lots of new things in Bootstrap 5. No more JQeury! I never liked this framework to be honest so glad it's gone. The WebApp feels faster may well be due to this.

A fair bit of old browsers support are dropped though:

• Dropped Microsoft Edge Legacy
  
• Dropped Internet Explorer 10 and 11
  
• Dropped Firefox < 60
  
• Dropped Safari < 10
  
• Dropped iOS Safari < 10
  
• Dropped Chrome < 60
  
• Dropped Android < 6
  

For all intents and purposes supporting old browsers isn't a good thing due to security reasons. So if you guys have problems, upgrade to the latest version and things should work fine.

We are back on track, almost ! Fixed code is now updated on demo site. There are still some display issues with the small screen, will continue to address them in later betas and final release.

Edit: LOL, just noticed the cellspacing for the versions that was "fixed" earlier in the week is now unnecessary. The row headers are now offset to far to the left now. Will address this later I hope.

[Bromf]

We are back on track

You're always on track !!  It's just the rest of the world that lags !!

All the best for starting the new Day-Job....!!

[patricia1066]

I checked the iPhone se on Duckandduckgo and safari ios 15.0.2 browsers - all looks good and the dashboard buttons are properly aligned and no longer showing HTML code. You can identify Safari by the Plusnet on top left hand corner of the screenshot. 

I expect android will have the same improvement, if I find a problem I will update.

What a quick turnaround! 
Hope the day job is going just as well.