Simplistic web GUI for kids?

[bluepuma77]

Hi all,

my kids have now outgrown the printed NFC/RFID cards and want more audiobooks

My idea is to build a simple web user GUI which just shows series and episodes. Either a whole series or just selected episodes. This UI should then work on a simple RasPi with touch display or on a locked-down smartphone. And play audio from Spotify.

What’s the best way to get the started? Take an existing UI like Iris, strip it down and rebuild?

Cheers
bluepuma

[kingosticks]

Might depend a bit on how familiar you are with the framework iris utilises. It’s quite a complex webclient. Might be easier to start with one of the simpler ones, or even stater from scratch. I don’t think there are many (any?) that are optimised around touch so this sounds cool.

[bluepuma77]

Thanks.

I did some more research and found the awesome Mopidy.js JavaScript library

[sapristi]

I think it would not be too difficult to add this kind of feature to mowecl.

The UI is somewhat modular, adding a new view seems totally doable to me. If you want to “lock” users into the view, you could add a setting for that. Also touch screen is supported (not that I did much to enable this, but the combination of react + material-ui seems good enough). The footer layout (track controls + information) is not a perfect fit for small screens, but is still totally usable (I sometime use it on my phone).
Also I don’t know much about the topic, but there’s something called “react native” to compile a react app to android, I am somewhat interested about working in this direction some time in the future.

Also for audiobooks I have added support for bookmarks in mowecl !

[bluepuma77]

Thanks for sharing. I really like the idea of mopidy-bookmarks.

Audiobooks are mostly used by the kids. So far I have fetched the current state every few seconds and saved it to DB and had a special function to restore it (load playlist, skip to title and fast forward to second).