Show HN: Minimalist Google Play Music Wrapper – Electron | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Minimalist Google Play Music Wrapper – Electron

pmsaue0.github.io

16 pointspmsaue013 comments

I think it's pretty cool, great job.

I just wanted to give a positive comment, specifically about the things that people are giving negative comments about. The website design isn't boring, and emphasizes that the app differentiator is that it's looking to be a better design and have things like "album art first".

Electron does have a small resource problem, but that doesn't stop plenty of people from downloading the desktop version of Slack, or other popular electron wrappers. There's a reason a lot of people put up with Electron, it fills a gap.

Whether you did this to try Electron or design, comments on HN can be very subjective and not representative of actual reception. I personally never thought album art was super important cause I grew up with Napster, but like "cover flow" was REALLY well received. Artistic design is especially highly opinionated.

Thanks for your positive feedback! I appreciate it :)

It is essentially like running Google Play Music in your Chrome browser, but as a native standalone app with some extra controls, nicer styles, and without having to use Flash.

So why not just deliver this as a plugin for Chrome that reskins Play with alternative stylesheets and so forth? At least then my OS can use COW to share memory across Chrome processes instead of requiring a dedicated WebKit instance just for Play.

That sounds cool... I've not tried making a plugin before. Do you know of a good reference / demo?

Another reason that I wanted a standalone app, is that I hate when I have to flip through tabs or browser windows to find Google Play. I much prefer having the app by itself.

Thanks!

Probably logical to start here!

https://developer.chrome.com/getstarted

Please don't. Sometimes I just want to listen to music. Having to open chrome means several gigs of memory and 30 tabs.

Electron effectively means opening Chrome anyway.

Also: you do know that you can close tabs right?

No, it doesn't. Electron doesn't open chrome and tabs. It opens a unique chrome process. And yes, I'll just close all my other work and have to reopen manually later to have a music player...

Can minimalist and Electron be put in the same sentence with a straight face?

haha, yea. "Minimal" in the layout of Google Play is what I meant. obvs the most minimal engine for Google Play is just Chrome.

Also see https://www.googleplaymusicdesktopplayer.com/

Wouldn't call it minimalist -- hard a super hard time reading the following:

> the U N O F F I C I A L G O O G L E M U S I C P L A Y E R with M I N I M A L I S T S T Y L I N G S.

with all those icons and mixed fonts and the background image.

Is this just a skin for loop? I see that it's based on loop, and I can't seem to find any differences in functionality.

haha, yes the website is just a fun thing. Boilerplate websites get so boring ;)

Yes, it is in part a skin for loop. Some of the added functionality is to replace the small album art with larger album art when in the album-view. But really, I just wanted the keyboard shortcuts that I like, and I wanted the look that I like. Pretty much, that's it.

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