🔧🪛 MiloDB: Experimental GUI 4.0.0

[FrozenWolf]

THIS THREAD IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED

Following the formal release of MiloDB 4.0.0, please refer to the original MiloDB thread, viewtopic.php?p=379159#p379159 for support.

Many thanks to all those who provided feedback on the new graphical variant prior to its release.

[FrozenWolf]

5. User guide

This is a very brief user guide to point the way to things that aren't very obvious. See the included

milodb-user-guide.pdf

for more comprehensive information.

5.1. Query panel

The top panel is the Query panel that allows you to enter search terms to search the database. As a simple example, try entering:

    text contains mango

...and press Return to perform a search.

Suggestions on what you can enter are shown underneath the edit box, and the TAB key can be used to accept a suggestion.

5.2. List panel / Card panel

The left-most panel is the 'List' panel, and the middle panel is the 'Card' panel.
Double-click on a tease to open it, or use the right-click menu.
Click on the header of a column in the 'List' panel to sort.
Right-click on the header in the 'List' panel to choose visible columns.

5.3. Update dialog

This is opened by clicking the 'Update' button on the top-right. It will check to see if there are any updates available and give you the option of updating if you want to.

You can also view the different variants of the application, and can switch to a different variant if you want to. For example, you might want to switch back to the terminal variant of the application.

5.3. Config dialog

This is opened by clicking the 'Config button on the top-right. There probably needs to be some guidance on what the fields do, but there isn't at the moment.

6. Change History

4.0.0, 2025-07-31

• Fixed: Dialogs now get focus when opened
• Fixed: Highlighting of query tokens with leading escape sequences were not highlighted correctly
• Changed: Numeric keypad can now be used for text cursor navigation on Linux
• Database: Updated to 2025-04-29

4.0.0-rc.3, 2025-07-15

• Changed: Query expression now has syntax colouring
• Changed: Extended user guide

4.0.0-rc.2, 2025-07-07

• Added: 'Generate Summary' button to summarise results in an HTML page
• Added: Columns for audio file counts to the list panel
• Added: Statistics for audio file counts to the statistics dialog
• Changed: Extended user guide

4.0.0-rc.1, 2025-06-30

• Fixed: Update failed when trying to rename non-existent config files
• Changed: Renamed core files for consistency
• Changed: Improved contrast of tease selection in panels
• Database: Updated to 2025-03-30

4.0.0-beta.2, 2025-06-24

• Fixed: Log text in log window did not expand when the window was resized
• Added: Initial user guide
• Changed: Used fixed width font for log text
• Changed: Improved consistency of fonts and font sizes across platforms
• Changed: Prefixed error messages are now coloured

4.0.0-beta.1, 2025-05-30

• Fixed: Suggestion text in the query panel is now blank when the cursor is after an error
• Fixed: Expanded text in query panel is no longer cut off prematurely when there is an error within a variable
• Fixed: Error underline in query panel will now highlight the variable if there is an error in the variable
• Fixed: Error underline in query panel is now positioned correctly after variable expansion
• Added: Configuration tab for variables
• Added: Word count as a column in the list panel
• Added: Expansion text shows error underline when there is an error in a variable
• Changed: Expansion text now word-wraps when it is wider than the window
• Changed: Query text is now a variable width font
• Changed: Improved theme consistency between platforms
• Database: Updated to 2025-02-27

4.0.0-alpha.11, 2025-05-11

• Fixed: Handling of quoted text in custom launch commands
• Added: Config dialog

4.0.0-alpha.10, 2025-04-30

• Fixed: Mouse-wheel scrolling now works reliably in all tabs of update dialog
• Changed: Status icon shown on query panel now matches theme
• Added: Text pages can now be selected for consistency with other panels
• Added: List panel supports copying rows from right-click menu
• Added: Card panel supports copying cards from right-click menu
• Added: Text panel supports copying text from right-click menu
• Added: About dialog now shows the amount of memory used by the application
• Database: Recovered some missing author names and IDs
• Database: Updated to 2025-01-29

4.0.0-alpha.9, 2025-04-16

• Fixed: Log message prefixes are no longer doubled-up in log displays
• Changed: Cells in the list panel are now aligned left/right/middle as appropriate
• Changed: TeaseId (TID) and AuthorId (AID) are not shown by default in the list panel
• Changed: When updating to a different variant, all change history is now shown
• Changed: When updating, all change history is now shown with the new changes highlighted
• Changed: Dialogs are now opened in the middle of the main window
• Added: Columns in the list panel can now be hidden/shown with a right-click menu
• Added: Progress dialog is displayed during a search
• Added: Wait cursor is displayed during a search

4.0.0-alpha.8, 2025-03-31

• Fixed: Dragging the stats dialog around the screen no longer lags behind the mouse cursor
• Changed: Improved speed of opening stats dialog
• Changed: Show top 100 entries in stats dialog instead of 80
• Changed: Show newest and oldest tease date in stats dialog
• Database: Stripped duplicate page names from NYX teases
• Database: Updated to 2024-12-31

4.0.0-alpha.7, 2025-03-28

• Fixed: Scroll-wheel now works on background of some tables
• Changed: Open tease/author is now disabled if launch configuration option is set to 'none'
• Added: About dialog
• Added: Stats dialog

4.0.0-alpha.6, 2025-03-21

• Changed: Replaced text with icons for TOTM and tease/author status in list panel
• Changed: Reordered columns in list panel
• Added: Sort by any column in the list panel
• Added: Highlight which list column is used for sorting
• Added: Invert sort direction when clicking on list header again

4.0.0-alpha.5, 2025-03-16

• Changed: Upgraded setuptools package to try and avoid Microsoft Defender false-positive trojan detection

4.0.0-alpha.4, 2025-03-14

• Changed: 'Open Author...' in popup menu will be disabled if author is not known
• Added: Popup menu now includes opening of a tease author's tease list
• Added: Popup menu now includes copying of tease and author URIs

4.0.0-alpha.3, 2025-03-13

• Fixed: Update no longer tries to execute 'None' when switching to a non-supported platform
• Fixed: Update no longer fails when trying to delete non-existent deprecated config files
• Changed: During update, temporary files are placed in subdirectory of main application instead of system temp
• Added: Warn user when trying to update/switch to a variant with an unsupported main executable
• Added: Scroll selected tease into view in other panels if not visible
• Added: Popup menu to open tease/author profile

4.0.0-alpha.2, 2025-03-10

• Fixed: Windows - Scrolling the card panel up and down with the scroll bar crashed the application

4.0.0-alpha.1, 2025-03-09

• Added: Initial release of GUI for evaluation edition

[Trusfrated]

Wow! It's really happening!

This will be great for getting more people to try MiloDB, I think.

Early feedback:

* Pressing Tab after "Update Switch" doesn't provide a hint.
* Scrolling too quickly through the center window causes text to overlap as it struggles to update/refresh. Mine crashed/closed shortly after.

I think this is a difficult undertaking. The layout and use of screen real estate is a challenge. I am excited to see how it progresses and becomes more refined!

[FrozenWolf]

Wow! It's really happening!

This will be great for getting more people to try MiloDB, I think.

Many thanks for trying it out. Let's hope so!

* Pressing Tab after "Update Switch" doesn't provide a hint.

The hints 'should' appear in real-time as you type, directly underneath the edit box as the 'Suggestion', based on where your cursor is.
It lists all of the possibilities by default:

tab-completion-1.png (5.99 KiB) Viewed 559870 times

Then after typing 's' (for example), restricts it to just two:

tab-completion-2.png (4.54 KiB) Viewed 559869 times

Then after typing 'u', it's just down to one, and pressing TAB will finally accept the suggestion:

tab-completion-3.png (4.42 KiB) Viewed 559869 times

Then is has suggestions for the next part:

tab-completion-4.png (5.52 KiB) Viewed 559869 times

If it doesn't work for you or it's just not intuitive, let me know, maybe we can fix or improve it.

* Scrolling too quickly through the center window causes text to overlap as it struggles to update/refresh. Mine crashed/closed shortly after.

Thanks, that hasn't happened to me yet, so I'll push it hard to see if I can reproduce it.

The layout and use of screen real estate is a challenge. I am excited to see how it progresses and becomes more refined!

I agree, it's all a bit crushed together, and I did spend far too long trying to work out how it could be better arranged, but I didn't really come up with anything. I wasn't even sure if anyone would want both the list view and the card view (centre window) visible at the same time. There are improvements I'll be making to the list view to reduce the width real-estate. If you can think of anything better, let me know.

[Carnal1]

First impression: Wow!!

Things I like:

• The suggestions/expected/hints for Querys are great( especially for querys I rarely used, I often used to guess wrong & resort to help a lot) this is very nice.

• Dark mode is fine, looks very good, none of your comments about layout/color/etc are an issue for me. I do like both list and card views. And if someone doesn't they can be shrunk sideways to point of disappearing.

• 3 sections showing results, very nice & convenient

• the 3 clickboxes on rhs window - nice! (I hadn't been aware of the "only matching pages" or not option before if it even existed,but seems that this could be handy at times with the abilty to see all the pages in a tease.)

• That you created this very handy tool and continually update it! Fantastic!!

Things I'd prefer different (most really minor):

• Ability to select and copy ( you can in the query input box, but not elsewhere) I see you have already identified this shortcoming

• "Trusfrated: * Scrolling too quickly through the center window causes text to overlap as it struggles to update/refresh. Mine crashed/closed shortly after." - definitely happens and once it does can't undo without closing and reopening the program. Doesn't have to be particularly fast scroll. I couldn't get the problem scrolling with mouse wheel, only view the window's slider. (Windows10/Firefox, pretty basic laptop)

• I was about to complain I was unable to open a resultant tease and thought I'd have to manually type in a browser window, when I discovered double clicking opened a tease. I had expected to be able to right click and get a menu to open or something similar. You've probably already planned at some point perhaps a short help/guide to be included for new users.

• Can sort most of the results columns, but can't change the sort direction -ie. oldest-newest, newest-oldest
  (what does "Umg" stand for??)

• When selecting a tease by clicking on it in left side window, it would be nice if that brought the tease either to top of middle window or at least brought it into view there. Currently it seems to highlight it, but very subtly.

I guess "browse" isn't really needed any longer - again, I see you've identified this. I debated whether this mattered to me and I guess with all the gui version has, it's not needed.

[FrozenWolf]

First impression: Wow!!

Thanks!

• the 3 clickboxes on rhs window - nice! (I hadn't been aware of the "only matching pages" or not option before if it even existed,but seems that this could be handy at times with the abilty to see all the pages in a tease.)

Yeah, I wasn't sure how many people used the '

showall

' or '

browseall

' commands that basically did the same as 'show' and 'browse' but showed all of the text without any abbreviation.

Things I'd prefer different (most really minor):

• Ability to select and copy ( you can in the query input box, but not elsewhere) I see you have already identified this shortcoming

There's a bit of a complication with text selection based on the way that the UI library (tkinter) works. I've tried to make it as fast as possible by doing a lot of rendering-on-demand. I think the first implementation may be a right-click-menu that allows you to copy the block of text that you're hovering over.

• "Trusfrated: * Scrolling too quickly through the center window causes text to overlap as it struggles to update/refresh. Mine crashed/closed shortly after." - definitely happens and once it does can't undo without closing and reopening the program. Doesn't have to be particularly fast scroll. I couldn't get the problem scrolling with mouse wheel, only view the window's slider. (Windows10/Firefox, pretty basic laptop)

I managed to reproduce it very easily on Windows. It works flawlessly on Linux which is where I do the development, and the regression testing I did in Windows involved only using the mouse-wheel, so I completely missed the fact that it's severely broken. It seems to be related to the creation of multiple text widgets during a scroll event. It might be a tkinter bug (there are plenty of them!).

• I was about to complain I was unable to open a resultant tease and thought I'd have to manually type in a browser window, when I discovered double clicking opened a tease. I had expected to be able to right click and get a menu to open or something similar. You've probably already planned at some point perhaps a short help/guide to be included for new users.

I completely forget about providing a simple guide on how to use the app, that's a very valid point. I'll add something to the initial posts.

• Can sort most of the results columns, but can't change the sort direction -ie. oldest-newest, newest-oldest
  (what does "Umg" stand for??)

Another good point, they should toggle. I wasn't sure whether to bother with being able to sort against multiple keys like you can in the terminal version, e.g. '

sort hits -rating title

' or just stick to one column. There certainly should be some indication of which column is currently being sorted on, and selecting it again would reverse the order.

I'd forgotten I'd left Img and Umg in there

• Img = Number of image references
• Umg = Number of unique image references

That also reminds me that I need to right-justify some of those columns.

• When selecting a tease by clicking on it in left side window, it would be nice if that brought the tease either to top of middle window or at least brought it into view there. Currently it seems to highlight it, but very subtly.

That's a good idea, definitely one for the list.

[Trusfrated]

* Pressing Tab after "Update Switch" doesn't provide a hint.

The hints 'should' appear in real-time as you type, directly underneath the edit box as the 'Suggestion', based on where your cursor is.
It lists all of the possibilities by default:
tab-completion-1.png
Then after typing 's' (for example), restricts it to just two:
tab-completion-2.png
Then after typing 'u', it's just down to one, and pressing TAB will finally accept the suggestion:
tab-completion-3.png
Then is has suggestions for the next part:
tab-completion-4.png

If it doesn't work for you or it's just not intuitive, let me know, maybe we can fix or improve it.

This was a very minor quibble. I was referring specifically to the terminal version when executing the command to switch to the gui version. I think after I typed "Update" I could tab and get the hint to type "Switch" next, but after that it I couldn't get a hint to show me I needed to type "gui-windows" (or "gui-linux" presumably) next. So I only knew the specific command because of your forum post. Sorry I wasn't more clear in the first place.

[FrozenWolf]

This was a very minor quibble. I was referring specifically to the terminal version when executing the command to switch to the gui version. I think after I typed "Update" I could tab and get the hint to type "Switch" next, but after that it I couldn't get a hint to show me I needed to type "gui-windows" (or "gui-linux" presumably) next. So I only knew the specific command because of your forum post. Sorry I wasn't more clear in the first place.

Ah, sorry, I completely misread what you meant, that's my mistake, and you're absolutely right, the tab completion doesn't provide suggestions for the variants. The reason for that is that the parser doesn't know what the variants are until the command is actually executed; only then does it retrieve the version manifest from the Internet which contains the list of variants. I'll add something to the help text for the 'update' command.

[FrozenWolf]

MiloDB 4.0.0-alpha.2, 2025-03-10

• Fixed: Windows - Scrolling the card panel up and down with the scroll bar crashed the application
  I implemented a workaround to prevent the crash, in this case postponing the drawing of the cards until idle (i.e. a bit later). This has the unfortunate consequence that while scrolling, the whole panel will flicker or be completely blank ... but at least it doesn't crash.

Update
Use the '

Update

' button to update (hopefully).

[Trusfrated]

Update
Use the '

Update

' button to update (hopefully).

On my Windows machine, this update caused Defender to halt the installation and flag it as a trojan. I am confident there is nothing nefarious with your software. It's good to be safe, but this is surely a false positive. I can't recall having an issue with this before with miloDB.

After restoring and marking the file as safe, I had to go into the update-backup folder and extract files from the latest zip, then re-run the update. After that, it was fine.

That said, the scrolling works MUCH better now! It's so great to be able to easily browse the full history of Milovana with the thumbnails and ratings and everything else you'd expect fully intact. Nice work!

[Trusfrated]

A request (or two?): It's great to able to just double click on the tease to open it, but I would also like to be able to click on the green Author text to open their profile or see their other teases. Or perhaps doing that should filter the view in miloDB?

For that matter, maybe the tags should react the same way? Maybe this could add on to what Carnal1 was saying about having a right-click menu to actually open the resulting page on Milovana.com. It would be cool if we could open filtered views from milodb on the actual milo, since there are significant bugs in the search system here. This way you could send the correct format of the filtered link, at least for simple things like author or tag or TOTM, etc.

Just some thoughts.

[FrozenWolf]

Update
Use the '

Update

' button to update (hopefully).

On my Windows machine, this update caused Defender to halt the installation and flag it as a trojan. I am confident there is nothing nefarious with your software. It's good to be safe, but this is surely a false positive. I can't recall having an issue with this before with miloDB.

Thanks for letting me know. I didn't have any problems when testing the updating on my Windows 10 with Defender, but it's definitely something we need to keep an eye on in the future. I might make a change to the update mechanism to download the temporary files into a subdirectory of the MiloDB application rather than the system temp directory. That might make the anti-virus software a little less sensitive.

After restoring and marking the file as safe, I had to go into the update-backup folder and extract files from the latest zip, then re-run the update. After that, it was fine.

Good to know that the backup system worked correctly at least.

That said, the scrolling works MUCH better now! It's so great to be able to easily browse the full history of Milovana with the thumbnails and ratings and everything else you'd expect fully intact. Nice work!

Great, thanks! My top priority for any application is always reliability, I want to get those sorts of issues fixed first, even if it's at the expense of functionality or appearance.

[FrozenWolf]

A request (or two?): It's great to able to just double click on the tease to open it, but I would also like to be able to click on the green Author text to open their profile or see their other teases. Or perhaps doing that should filter the view in miloDB?

Good suggestions indeed. I think I can add a click-handler to the author text at least, and then there's the question of what it should do with the click.
If it changed the filter to just show the teases from the author, do you think it should:

• Keep the highlights from the current query?
• Just show the teases from the author which are in the existing list?
• Leave the query at the top as it currently is?
• Replace the query at the top with e.g. '

  author is trusfrated

  '?
• Extend the query at the top with e.g. '

  and author is trusfrated

  '?

I imagine there could also be a 'back' button, i.e. if you click on the author, it shows all of and only the teases of the author, and the 'back' button could take you back to the previous results. For now, I think I'll just get the event handling in place to open the author profile in the browser, just as a first step. We can change the behaviour completely after the basic plumbing is in place.

For that matter, maybe the tags should react the same way?

That could certainly be done. It's worth remembering though that the tags shown for each tease are only a subset of the tags actually assigned to the tease by the author, and the most recent server update sorted them all alphabetically so the majority of tags towards the end of the alphabet are not captured. I don't know of any way to retrieve all of the tags for a tease.

Maybe this could add on to what Carnal1 was saying about having a right-click menu to actually open the resulting page on Milovana.com. It would be cool if we could open filtered views from milodb on the actual milo, since there are significant bugs in the search system here. This way you could send the correct format of the filtered link, at least for simple things like author or tag or TOTM, etc.

That's definitely something we can consider, although whether Milovana.com can be opened to show a specific list of teases is unknown to me.

[Electro]

This is a major update and it's nice to see everything with the thumbnails and it's nice that I can easily scroll through and find things. Thank you so much for putting this together!

[Trusfrated]

A request (or two?): It's great to able to just double click on the tease to open it, but I would also like to be able to click on the green Author text to open their profile or see their other teases. Or perhaps doing that should filter the view in miloDB?

Good suggestions indeed. I think I can add a click-handler to the author text at least, and then there's the question of what it should do with the click.
If it changed the filter to just show the teases from the author, do you think it should:

• Keep the highlights from the current query?
• Just show the teases from the author which are in the existing list?
• Leave the query at the top as it currently is?
• Replace the query at the top with e.g. '

  author is trusfrated

  '?
• Extend the query at the top with e.g. '

  and author is trusfrated

  '?

I imagine there could also be a 'back' button, i.e. if you click on the author, it shows all of and only the teases of the author, and the 'back' button could take you back to the previous results. For now, I think I'll just get the event handling in place to open the author profile in the browser, just as a first step. We can change the behaviour completely after the basic plumbing is in place.

Oh boy, those are tough questions! I was only referring to opening the author's list of teases in an external browser on milo, just like how you open a tease that is double clicked. I hadn't really considered changing the query in miloDB that way, but that's definitely worth considering (provided you implement that "back" button to undo mistakes.)

Maybe this could add on to what Carnal1 was saying about having a right-click menu to actually open the resulting page on Milovana.com. It would be cool if we could open filtered views from milodb on the actual milo, since there are significant bugs in the search system here. This way you could send the correct format of the filtered link, at least for simple things like author or tag or TOTM, etc.

That's definitely something we can consider, although whether Milovana.com can be opened to show a specific list of teases is unknown to me.

I used to believe that the Advanced Search here on Milo was pretty bug-ridden. I'm sure that's the main reason you created this wonderful piece of software. I just tried it again and it seems to work better than I recall. I think seraph0x must've repaired it a while ago and I didn't notice. Now you can chain together several search options and the filtered result seems correct.

For instance you can get something like this if you use the permanent link:

https://milovana.com/webteases/?tags=fo ... amp;type=4

Or simply one author's list of teases:

https://milovana.com/webteases/?author=110114

Or a single tag:

https://milovana.com/webteases/?tags=chastity

Either way, I'm sure you know this. Nevermind...


Do you plan to make the words in Expected or Suggestion clickable?