I finally decided to try my hand at coding and this is the result of about 2 weeks of learning. I decided to skip the tutorials and books and jumped straight into coding. The code's mess but it works and that's great.
I still have a lot to learn, but I do plan on adding three features:
1. Have new searches not interrupt the current song.
2. Make the video resizable.
3. Add playlists. I actually asked a fellow HN-ers to help out with this because I don't think I'll be able to handle databases yet.
I would also recommend hiding the auto-suggest right hand side bar until everything is loaded and then sliding it into view when ready. I suggest this for 2 reasons,
1. I initially clicked the song and the first thing I noticed, before I the music played was the "this might take 90 seconds dialog" and I was ready to kill the tab thinking.
2. Just the fact that it says this might take a long time, is a 'downer', its better to make that view visible when it is ready so that user doesn't have to ever know of the fact that you have a process that takes 90 seconds.
I am a designer, and have coded HTML/CSS before. I have been trying to learn coding for years, but never get beyond the intro chapters in most books.
So this is my project. I just picked PHP (because it seemed to be simple enough - just drop <?php ?> into the HTML), and decided to code this concept. Lots of stackoverflow and github searches later I finally have a working version.
Ah the HTML/CSS background explains a lot. Because most first-time coders could never make anything this nice looking. And it's very functional too, so I'm definitely not trying to bash your PHP skills.
Perhaps make the area below the video player clickable so that it makes the video appear in a larger area above the song list.
I am very impressed. Great work Ashraful!