Ron F. wrote: 
> I use the Material APK on an Android phone to control my players.
> Inevitably the question should arise: what is the max number of buttons
> that should be present in such an interface? It could be argued from the
> perspective of human factors and interface design that there are already
> too many buttons! I would not make that argument myself; I like it the
> way it is, only suggesting that no more buttons should be added to the
> basic design as it stands now.

I agree, there are more than enough buttons on show as is. Which was my
objection to adding the power button there. I still see no issue with it
being in the list. Not everyting needs to be in your face.

Ron F. wrote: 
>  using a heart-shaped icon, be added to the "Now Playing" display so
> that the currently playing track could be quickly tagged as a favorite.
> The only reason I never did so, (there is precedence in streaming apps
> for this by the way) is because I thought that doing this would
> contribute to cluttering "Now Playing."

(I think) you're mixing "like" with "favourite". Most apps have a heart
icon to indicate that this is a liked track, not that it should be
bookmarked into a favourites list. For this "like" feature, Material
supports TrackStat. (If there was a simpler like/no-like API then I
would also add support for that). I can't see why you'd really want to
favourite a single track. But, perhaps you mean to favourite a Radio
stream whilst it is playing? That would make sense, and I'd gladly add
the add/remove favourite feature here. But, (AFAIK) there is no way to
get the station icon for the stream - in which case the favourite would
have the cover of the current track, or a generic icon. Both are
sub-optimal. This is why there is no add/remove favourite feature in the
queue either.


Ron F. wrote: 
> All that said, I think an argument can be made that using color as the
> primary means to convey status to the user is not a good idea.

I have tried to avoid that as much as possible. For most on/off items
the icon itself also changes (the show/hide queue icon is very subtly
different). Problem with power-state is that I could create a new icon
(e.g. "()" == off, "(I) == on) but I -think- this might confuse others.
Material does dim the icon when off, and brighten+colour when on -
which, to me, seems consistent with other UIs.

AFAICS, the ony other icons that do this are repeat/no-repeate and
shuffle/no-shuffle. But again, this is consistent with other UIs. But,
if there is a better way then I'm all for it.

Ron F. wrote: 
> In Material, when the list of known players is presented, the currently
> selected player is highlighted by coloring it's icon and on/off button:)
> The buttons look very nice: love them! I would suggest however doing
> more, such as bolding the font for the current player's name in the
> list, or something to catch the user's attention quickly. Currently I
> myself have no less than 8 players that appear in this drop-down list.

I agree here. But not sure how to indicate it. If you have a group
player, Material uses a bold (but dimmed) font for "Standard players"
and "Group players" section titles. Perhaps I could remove those, and
then bold the font of the active player.



*Material debug:* 1. Launch via http: //SERVER:9000/material/?debug=json
(Use http: //SERVER:9000/material/?debug=json,cometd to also see update
messages, e.g. play queue) 2. Open browser's developer tools 3. Open
console tab in developer tools 4. REQ/RESP messages sent to/from LMS
will be logged here.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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