Weird Waves is now in beta! In fact, while writing this I realised it's almost out of beta, going by the goals I set at the start. Here's how its progress looked in alpha, is looking in beta, and will hopefully look in gamma:

  1. First, I got the basic script up and running, so the site can play audio tracks on a schedule that's the same for every listener and seamlessly move from schedule to schedule each week, and I laid out and styled the site to give it a decently-readable presentation. Total show count: 104/100 by the end.

  2. Second, I've added extra features and options that make the site more useable (or just that I think are neat) while tweaking the scripts and style. More info in the rest of this post! Total show count: 132/250 at the moment.

  3. Third, I'll fine-tune things, add more decoration, and make a general version of Weird Waves for anyone out there who wants to use the format themselves. Total show count: aiming for 520 (so with the current 10 shows per schedule, each show could be used once per year).

And then at some point in the future I'll see about rewriting certain parts of the code from scratch, because there's probably better or more efficient ways to do some of the things the main script does.

Beta to-do list

Here's my to-do list for beta, expanded a bit from the to-do list I wrote on the app's news section when I finished alpha:

Landing page

The landing “page” is done, including a feature that highlights recent news (with 24 hours leeway) and a little intro section was well:

Screenshot of the new Weird Waves landing page: two columns of text with sections separated by waveforms. On the left: a section explaining briefly what Weird Waves is, and a list of the 3 latest news items (the top one, posted today, is indented to mark that it's unseen). On the right: the name and description for the week's schedule, and a small table of the next 6 shows on the Forecast.

Theme and font pickers

The theme picker's also done, with 4, then 12 themes (6 dark, 6 light). Each one's got a button marked with the name and colour palette. With 1(?) exception, every colour combination meets the triple-A WCAG 2.0 guideline. I'm thinking of doing some more colour schemes later—gimmicky ones that maybe aren't as useable or accessible as the regular 12—but for now, this is done (theme in the screenshots is Ash):

Screenshot of the Weird Waves theme picker, a 2-by-6 set of buttons with named colour palettes. The dark themes are named "Dark", "Goop", "Flame", "Plasm", "Moss", and "Darker". The light themes are named "Light", "Wine", "Ash", "Dust", "Mist", and "Silver".

The font picker looks pretty much the same, but it's just got 2 options for now: serif (Bitter) and sans (Fira Sans).

“Personal primetime”

Finally, I added “personal primetime”, which adds dots beside shows in the range of time you mark as “primetime” in the settings:

Personal Primetime

The “personal primetime” settings. In this case primetime is active, starts at 16 (4 p.m.), and ends at 22 (10 p.m.). This doesn't include the show that starts at 10 p.m.
Part of the Forecast with personal primetime active, showing primetime shows marked with coloured dots.

Reaching 250 shows

I'm gonna have to branch out to get to 250, since of the 6 series/sources I've got so far I'm pretty much done with 2 (Lights Out and Quiet, Please) and another 2 don't have much left (Suspense and probably Mindwebs). Here are some other sources I'm looking at:

All are (at least de facto) in the public domain or released under open licenses, except maybe Seeing Ear Theatre and The Black Mass (need to do more research).

Discarded plans

Next?

It feels kinda weird to know that I've built the site up to where I wanted it to be when I started making it (other than decorations and number of shows, and other ongoing stuff like adding links). It looks fine (AFAIK) at different screen sizes, it hasn't (to my knowledge) got any critical bugs in certain browsers, it has all the features and icons I was planning, it's (relatively) efficient (I think), it's got over 100 shows

I've still gotta finish the to-do list. The biggest part will be getting to 250 shows—the reason I'm counting that as beta and not just doing it in the background is it stretches out the beta so (hopefully) more people can try out the site and I can catch any weird errors.

That said, I might combine beta and gamma (except the part about getting to 520 shows in gamma) and release the generic app at the end of beta.

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