HEAL your GUI and bring back the old but essential-useful functions right now!

[Unradelic]

First of all: will this be heard by the spotify developer community?

This is a request for developers who need to understand the basics of a GUI development: you can't avoid designing the interface between platforms.

The thing is i'm rather tired than angry from you to not pay a single attention to many issues, bugs and crashes i'm still observing for over two years now. I've been reporting stuff and making useful lists on the forums since the software was Beta and back in the days I got nice answers by developers. Now there is a wall between the public and the community. And so I understand why: soooo much users and so less support availability. Yet, this here needs to be read up there, so keep reading.

Nowadays the software on any platform looks so bad designed, it feels an Alpha development.

To simplify in a try to be able to someday get real improvements, i've reduced the main issues to two (2).

1 # A GUI designed on a embedded webkit with code on HTML-CSS-Javascript is not what I've subscribed back in the days where everything was a nice clean and fast C++.

This for me is the greatest issue. Developers in time get lazy and prefer to rely on a third-party platform to hold their work. Why run a browser software inside a software that essentially was written on C++?! To make the work versatile and easy to CMD+C, CMD+V? - you get it. So please don't come up stating this GUI framework dependance was made out to bring greater compatibility. Don't get me wrong, i've already said a good and professional software can't avoid to build a dedicated code for each platform.

What this leads to?

Irresponsible visual rendering as well as a high latency between functions sent from control (mouse events, keyboard events and even virtual control) and often, a must-wait-to-load-everything before you can actually pick what already is being displayed (god, how much I hate that, im sorry...) Also, loads of uncomprensive stored process memory. Recent days it kept between 80 and 90.000 K. I got no special issue about it since most software nowadays use loads of process memory. The thing is, are you really looking to reduce and optimise? Or you don't care anymore because computers are enough powerful to allow processing stuff we don't need at all? There resides a fine line between professional software development and a company that owns rights for music distribution and that is worried only to keep the income. You tell me here.

2 # Function reduction. Need me to explain, or you got it already? Lovely and HIGHLY useful functions were removed at the same time the software got it's embedded Chromium.

The Play Queue. What kind of mess has come in time with this? I fear visiting the play queue since it can crash while programming for long my nice morning of upcoming songs. I don't do that anymore, and it was a lovely thing to do on spotify: to rearrange songs up and down without latency on every move.
What about "Play up next from this playlist" without the need to interrupt the current playing song... So I can go make my own business knowing the next coming up is the desired? It just feels like this function was removed because not enough people was able to see it's potential, but it is really worth when dealing the perfect control for upcoming content. While I have no concerns for taking the decision from removing the popularity bars, you still keep the value in the API requests--what for? 😕 More stuff, why right-clicking a folder could not show up to play the entire content? Do I have to first click on it and then spot my mouse to the 'Play' button? Also, why can't I see the entire tracks content from a folder when I focus to it with a click?

Addressing to the CEO, stop from mentally splitting your incomes from the public and invest MORE developing intuitive and optimized solutions for your software, goddamit!

P.S. Attached are, the drops that filled out the glass to motivate this post. What a nice GUI you made 🙂 You are genius over there! [Allow yourself to detect the bunch of irony]

[Soundofus]

@Unradelic

Welcome and thanks for your well detailed contribution 🙂

Before start : I am under windows 10 and I am on the latest desktop version : 1.0.48.103

I am using Spotify since 2009 and I have seen and experienced all the changes. All along this time, and despite many changes, I have always been able to do what I became a premium user for : listening music, select what I want listen and first of all, curate playlists.

Personally, the way the UI is built doesn't matter, as long as I can find the music I want and click play to listen.

I am going to focus on two of your points :

Play Queue : The play queue has not always been perfect but with the latest changes on it, there is absolutly no problem to use it as : delete a song from the queue, move a song up or down in the queue. All that works perfectly.

Play an entire folder : nothing easier. double-click the name of the folder in the left column and it will start to play :

- The first song in the folder if there is only songs in the folder.

- The first song of the first playlist in the folder if it's a playlist folder.

- The first song of the first album in the folder if it's an album folder.

- If the button shuffle is on before you double-click, it will start to play a random song in the folder.

So, If you don't stop playing, all the content of the folder will be played, in order or randomly depending your choice.

I hope it will help you. If you need more informations, don't hesitate to contact me.

Have a good listening 🙂