Jouele is an amazing audio player for the web. It was built to look simple and beautiful, and to use a simple and beautiful declarative API. With Jouele, you write code like this:

<a href="ilya-birman-use-me-mix.mp3" class="jouele">
  Ilya Birman: Use Me (DJ Mix)
</a>

And you get a player like this:

Playlists, repeating and keyboard control were gradually added in the recent years. But we wanted Jouele to be even more advanced and versatile. And we didn’t want to sacrifice the declarative nature of Jouele’s APIs.

So we came up with something great: Jouele Pro with custom controls. Let me tell you about it.

What you can do with Jouele Pro

I’ve recently started publishing interactive playlists for my DJ mixes. You can click the cover art to start and pause playback. You can click a track’s name, and the mix will jump to that track. And the currently playing track gets automatically highlighted in the playlist when the playback reaches it.

Try it before reading on.

The magic is that neither the cover art, nor the playlist are a part of the Jouele user interface. The are just part of the page, layed out the way I want. But they gain their special abilities by using Jouele Pro’s declarative API.

So I have a player inserted with the code above, by using the CSS class jouele on an HTML a element. And I want the cover image to initiate and pause playback.

Here’s what I do:

<img
  src="cover.jpg"
  class="jouele-control"
  data-type="play-pause"
/>

That’s it. Now, when you click this image, the mix starts to play.

And to make the playlist items clickable, I do this:

<tr class="jouele-control"
  data-type="seek" data-to="0:45:38"
>
  <td>0:45:38</td>
  <td>Tensal</td>
  <td>Achievement 3</td>
</tr>

Now when you click on a track’s name, you go directly to it in the mix.

I also want the cover art to look somehow “active” when the music is playing. Here’s what I do in CSS:

img.jouele-is-playing {
  outline: rgba(255, 255, 255, .2) 10px solid;
}

That’s it. Jouele Pro dynamically sets the class jouele-is-playing on each of its controls during playback, so the cover art highlighting now works. No JavaScript needed.

The same way the highlighting of the currently playing playlist item works. The actual HTML code for each playlist item is this:

<tr class="jouele-control"
  data-type="seek" data-range="0:45:38...0:48:55"
>
  <td>0:45:38</td>
  <td>Tensal</td>
  <td>Achievement 3</td>
</tr>

This line is not just to jump to a point in time, but it also corresponds to a time range. To dynamically highlight it, I use this CSS:

tr.jouele-is-within {
  background: rgba(255, 255, 255, .2);
  color: #fd0093;
}

That’s it. Jouele sets the class jouele-is-within to all its range controls when the playback is within this range.

If there are several players on a page, the controls control the one that was playing previously, or the first one on the page, if nothing was playing before. You can link the controls to a particular player.

Jouele Pro is $39 per domain name. The free Jouele is available as before.

Links:

• Jouele
• Jouele Pro
• Documentation
  How to use the declarative API and the controls. There is also an example of a full custom player built with the controls
• Evgeniy Lazarev, the developer of Jouele and Jouele Pro

Over ten years ago I made the diagram of Chelyabinsk trams and trolleybuses. That design turned out to be very successful: dozens of designers used it as a reference for building their own diagrams. It wouldn’t be as good if not for Artem Gorbunov’s generous help.

Three years ago, together with Alexander Karavaev we made a new version of the diagram. It had a lot of design inventions: the “pencil-drawn” layer for buses and trolleybuses, the “watercolour” rivers and lakes, 3D terminals, the new shape of the stops’ ticks. With that diagram, a logo for chelyabinsk trams was born: the city’s coat of arms decorated with a pantograph.

Then Polina Lesnikova joined the team. She re-drew the map to account for the changes in routes. Together with Alexander, they changed a lot of details after testing the legibility of the previous version. Thus we arrived at the new diagram:

Some landmarks were added. The bus-and-trolleybuses layer gave the previous version some visual richness, and it was interesting to scrutinise. Unfortunately, it didn’t provide any notable utility, so we decided to remove it. This helped to simplify the geometry of lines and make the fonts bigger. The new diagram looks stronger.

Designed by Polina Lesnikova and Alexander Karavaev, art-directed by myself.

Aegea 2.7 has been released. Aegea is a great blogging engine.

What’s new

There are several new design themes, which look like this:

All new themes are based on the existing theme Plain, but redefine some CSS variables:

Above is the code of the theme “Douglas”, which looks like this:

You can now easily preview the themes from Settings. There is a link that opens a special contrived page, which includes all sorts of blog elements to test. This makes building themes much easier as you can preview your CSS in one place instead of wandering around the blog looking for elements to check.

The editor now supports these Google Docs keyboard shortcuts, thanks to Igor Adamenko:

There are also multiple improvements to the features related to social networking, comments, search, RSS and JSON feed, uploading of images and audio.

About Aegea

An engine is a program that runs on the blogger’s website. It provides the writing tools to the author, shows the posts to the readers and lets them write comments. Medium.com (or similar) is simpler, but they can shut down and take all your posts offline. With an engine, the blog runs on your own website and you have access to the files and the database (you don’t have to deal with the files or the database, but you own all the data).

I want most people to have access to personal blogging in this way. That’s why it uses the most easily available platform: PHP with MySQL.

Aegea powers this and many other blogs. Among my favourites:

• Oleg Andreev, software designer and crypto-anarchy historian, on Bitcoin and related stuff
• Daniel Lesden on music production
• Death by Passive Voice, on writing, by Max Bears

With Aegea, you can use one of the built-in themes or customise it however you like (this blog is an example). Be flexible with comments: allow and disallow them globally or per post. Refine posts using Drafts. Add images, videos, audio or code to illustrate your point. Organise your writing with tags.

Designers, writers, musicians and software developers use Aegea to show their work, communicate and spread knowledge. They love it because it’s simple and fast yet does everything they need. Aegea is free for personal use and paid for business use.

Learn more and get Aegea at blogengine.me.

Aegea 2.6 has been released. Aegea is a great blogging engine.

What’s new:

• Continuous autosaving of form data in post editors. Data is being saved locally in the browser. If the browser or the OS crashes, when you open the editor again, your latest changes will be there. If you edit the post from another device and save the changes to server, the most recent server version will open.
• The new search finds more relevant posts, works faster and formats the results in a better way. It will not show the full posts, but just the fragments with the search query. If the found post contains images, it will show their thumbnails for quicker identification. For example, try searching “street” in this blog.
• It’s now easier to set a post’s cover image for social networks. Just drag an image into the editor’s page. If you drop in onto the Text field, if will be inserted in text, but if you drop it outside the Text field, it will just get added to the post. Social networks will see it as part of the post, but it will not get displayed in its text.
• Improved database migration from older versions.
• Multiple other small improvements.

An engine is a program that runs on the blogger’s website. It provides the writing tools to the author, shows the posts to the readers and lets them write comments. Medium.com (or similar) is simpler, but they can shut down and take all your posts offline. With an engine, the blog runs on your own website and you have access to the files and the database (you don’t have to deal with the files or the database, but you own all the data).

I want most people to have access to personal blogging in this way. That’s why it uses the most easily available platform: PHP with MySQL.

Aegea powers this and many other blogs. Among my favourites:

• Death by Passive Voice, on writing, by Max Bears
• Daniel Lesden blog, on music production, by Daniel Lesden.

With Aegea, you can use the built-in neutral theme or customise it however you like (this blog is an example). Be flexible with comments: allow and disallow them globally or per post. Refine posts using Drafts. Add images, videos, audio or code to illustrate your point. Organise your writing with tags.

Designers, writers, musicians and software developers use Aegea to show their work, communicate and spread knowledge. They love it because it’s simple and fast yet does everything they need. Aegea is free for personal use and paid for business use.

Learn more and get Aegea at blogengine.me.

Jouele is a simple and beautiful audio player for the web. Eugene Lazarev has been developing it lately.

Version 2.3 has been released. Jouele now uses Howler (bundled) instead of jPlayer. This change helps use less bandwidth, display the preloader better and get rid of several bugs. The data-repeat feature is now supported on single tracks. When a file is unavailable, Jouele shows this with an icon, instead of just “hanging”. The markup works better in different browsers.

Song example:

See documentation on Github.

A web application’s front end (what the user sees) and back end (what happens on a remote server) are often developed separately. If the back end of some feature is not ready yet, the front-end developer is very limited in what they can do.

I’ve designed the user interface for Mimic 2.0, a web developer tool for mocking server responses in a browser. With Mimic, you can develop as if the server was alive. It’s very easy to set up a simple mock. Say, you want to pretend the server responds with a line of JSON:

It lets you set up very advanced mocks, adjusting HTTP headers, timeouts and what not:

The great thing about Mimic is that you don’t need to set up a local server and change request URIs in your application. It works with the existing applications as they are, right in the browser. And you don’t even need to install browser extensions: you just link one script to your application and that’s it.

Read more about the user interface on the project page.