Some additional enhancement requests. I know this list contains stuff
that won't be implemented for a while and maybe never, I'm just posting
it to give you some ideas how the application could be improved.
1.
When viewing tracks for a compilation album, I would like to see the
artist and not just the track name and number.
2.
Is there any chance you can implement support for artist images ? I've
used LastFM artist images in my Song Info plugin for a while and they
seems to work pretty good. The LastFM API is XML based, so you can
either call this directly from your application or you can use the JSON
command provided by the Song Info plugin. Let me know if you want more
information about the Song Info plugin interface and I'll provide you
with the details. The Song Info images is available in the context menu
of an artist if you like to test how good they are. On my Touch I'm
currently using a Custom Clock screen saver that rotates around the
LastFM artist images provided by LastFM for the current artist, makes
the display a lot more interesting than just showing the the same album
cover all the time.
3.
When implementing the context menu, it would be great if it was
possible to launch it for both artist, album and track on the currently
playing track. You might already have implemented this in the 1.2.0
version, I'm just mention it in case you haven't.
4.
It would be great to have some quick way to get to the top level menu
or as an alternative have toolbar buttons to access the most important
menus but that might clutter the interface a bit.
5.
Viewing large images through Michael's Picture Gallery plugin doesn't
seem to work, it's just sitting there and trying to load the image for
ever. The thumbnails in the parent menu did work.
6.
I wonder if would be nicer if the disconnected server disclaimer was
some kind of screen saver screen instead of that big disclaimer, maybe
just a big clock ? The case I'm thinking of is a server that likes to
hibernate/suspend when it isn't used. I'm not even sure if this will
work, maybe it won't even suspend if SqueezePad is connected to it ?
7.
I'm not sure if you want to support this but I'm mention it just in
case. The TrackStat menus provides three rows of data, only the two
upper rows are shown, the play count row is never shown. Of course,
this menu really only looks nice on iPeng today, it looks pretty bad on
SqueezePlay which tries to display all three rows but uses too large
font.
8.
Ideally, I would like a global search feature accessible from a
magnifying glass icon somewhere on the screen, but I'm not sure how
much implementation something like that requires. One search string
should find both artists, albums and tracks that matches the specified
search criteria.
9.
Cover flow. Besides the obvious use case to browse your albums this
could probably also be used for point 2 (artist images) and point 5
(Picture Gallery plugin) and point 12 (Flickr) mentioned elsewhere in
this list.
10.
A album wall that displays all albums as small icons, similar as the
the "Large Artwork" display option in the Albums menu in the SBS web
interface.
11.
Fast access to favorites/presets or whatever they are called these
days. This might be less important if point 4 described above is
implemented since the "Favorites" menu is available in the top level
menu.
12.
The "My Apps/Flickr" isn't able to display large images, nothing
happens when you click on a thumbnail image.
13.
It feels like I would like to be able to hide the menu and use that
screen space for something else when using SqueezePad in "screen saver
mode" when it's sitting in the docking station and isn't used for
selecting new music. Maybe displaying song lyrics, album reviews or
artist biography or just use it to display the artist, album and track
title with a bit larger font. Song lyrics, album reviews and biography
are available through third party plugins (Song Lyrics, Album Review,
Biography) so I'm not sure if you like to avoid integrating to tight
with third party stuff. I'm basically just mention this since the menu
part of the screen often feels pretty useless when the iPad isn't used
for selecting new music.
14.
When long text is displayed it shortens them with a "..." in the
middle, would be great if there was some way to display the complete
text.
15.
Server auto detection similar to what I believe iPeng supports would be
nice, will probably avoid some questions from non technical users who
just have plugged in their computer and Squeezebox on their network and
have no idea what an IP address is. Showing a list of available servers
with the possibility to specify one manually should make it a lot
easier for these users.
16.
A screen saver mode where you can configure what information to show
would be really great, maybe implementing something that supports the
Custom Clock configuration or something similar. I've actually though
about doing something like this myself but I'm not sure how useful it
would be as a standalone application without the possibility to also
browse your library.
I think the other stuff I've been thinking of already has been
mentioned.
Once again, I really love SqueezePad and I'm really impressed by your
work, as soon as a release with the context menus and Spotify play
command is available it's going to be my preferred way of controlling
my Squeezeboxes. The only problem now is that I've realized that some
of my album covers doesn't have enough resolution to look as good as
they could.
I'm sorry about this pippin, but viewing my Squeezebox library on the
large iPad screen in high resolution beats the current low resolution
iPeng app even if iPeng has a bit more features. However, my hope is
that we will soon see some competition ;-)
bluegaspode, if you need help to support something by adding some third
party stuff on the server side, just let me know.
--
erland
Erland Isaksson ('My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info))
(Developer of 'many plugins/applets'
(http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/User:Erland). If my answer
helped you and you like to encourage future presence on this forum
and/or third party plugin/applet development, 'donations are always
appreciated' (http://erland.isaksson.info/donate))
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