New Bucket Brigade UI

December 23rd, 2020
bucket_brigade, singing, tech
After using the UI that the Ritual Engine folks built for Solstice, I was feeling a bit embarrassed with how awkward and confusing stand-alone Bucket Brigade was:

I took a pass over it to make the UI more coherent:

There are a lot of changes, but the biggest ones:

  • There is now an explicit concept of 'bucket' in the UI:

    • Names are drawn in the appropriate bucket for their position.

    • You can join a bucket by clicking a button.

    • You shouldn't have to deal with numeric positions.

    • If you do need it there is still a box where you can manually enter a position, and positions are displayed in the mixing console

  • It uses the whole page instead of making you scroll around:

    • Links are across the top

    • Controls are across the bottom

    • If there is too much to display in the main panel, just not panel scrolls.

  • There are multiple main panels, with a tabbed interface.

  • Settings for configuring roundsinging are out of the main flow, on the "Advanced Settings" tab.

  • Debug settings are divided into ones that only affect you versus ones that affect everyone.

  • There's a setting for adjusting how loud the backing track / metronome is, if you're using one.

  • Instead of looking at the user agent string to determine whether the browser supports what we need, we specifically test for them (if (window.AudioWorklet) ...).

  • It is a (debatably) tasteful blue, and has a logo.

Since the app only works in modern browsers anyway, I styled the UI with flexbox. It's wonderful that there is now a way to use CSS that is solidly better than tables.

I'm pretty happy with it, and while we still don't have automated tests it seems to work correctly with my poking at it. If you find any problems or have suggestions, please let me know either in the comments here or by filing an issue.

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Effective altruism and PR

I. The “effective altruists should be more concerned about PR” brigade has been out in full force on X recently.

via Thing of Things October 8, 2026

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was …

via Posts on September 18, 2026

My Weirdy Creatures

Over the last few days, I've been working on some little creatres. But they're very weird. I call them "weirdy creatures". I've made quite a lot of them, I think maybe 5-6, not sure. Weirdy Predator This is a weirdy predator. They'…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts September 13, 2026

more     (via openring)