Random Lurker;401419 Wrote: > I finally took the plunge, and picked up an Ipod Touch to use as a > controller with iPeng to run a new Squeezebox receiver. The short > version is.....I love it! > Good to hear that. > > The longer version - Some comments/questions: > always welcome! Seriously! > > 1)... The Artists->All Albums list. I prefer this list order for > browsing....just like you would see them in a record store. When I > first selected this item, all you see is a blank screen. (I assume is > is getting/sorting the list). It takes a VERY long time for anything > to display. When it does, it is very responsive. I have seen vague > comments that this timing will improve... is this true? If I left the > list and returned, it still took a long time to load. > You guess right, it's the sorting. I really want to improve this on 1.1 - all other lists do already live without sorting, this one will need some special consideration. If you want to make sure I don't forget it, please file a ticket :-) https://trac.penguinlovesmusic.de/trac/ipengnat/newticket > > 2) Blank screens - on the above mentioned view and on search, when > something is actually happening but all you see is a blank screen, it > is hard to tell if the device is actually doing anything. Some sort of > progress indicator would help immensely. > Err.. Yes. For this screen, I plan on one, Search will be a bit more difficult, I'll see... > > 3) Custom Browse - I have seen some comments about CustomBrowse with > iPeng - but I assume they were talking about the plug-in, right? And > these are planned to be supported in 1.1? Do I have that right? > Yes, that's currently beta testing. Quite cool. > > 4) Pre-fetch - I appreciate that you have set it up so that it does not > lag while loading artwork.....but is there anyway to add an option to > pre-fetch all artwork? I would like to have all the art in place when > flipping thru the LONG list of albums, and would be willing to set > aside the iPod and wait while it grabbed all of this data, rather than > populating it as it was browsed. > Short answer: mostly no. The problem is two-fold. #1: Getting the artwork onto the device. I could indeed add a prefetch for this (another ticket?). But this will only get you half of what you want since... #2 Displaying the artwork while scrolling requires the images to be created in memory (RAM) since scrolling consumes almost all of iPhone's computing power and there is simply no way I can cram 8,000 images (plus all the radio artwork) into memory, it would alone consume more than I believe is typically available. There's another thing, however that I would like to do (ticket #3?): Do a more intelligent read-ahead that gives a chance to get artwork into memory you are likely to need next. Will probably give you the desired effect. > > 5) Search navigation - The one place I got confused in the UI was while > using the search screen. When the keyboard is up, I wasn't sure how to > "escape". I didn't intuitvly realize that I needed to make the > keyboard disappear to open up my navigation options. Maybe it's just > me, but it was a little confusing. > Yes, but I didn't find a way to place the keyboard above the buttons. Apple Remote does it the same way. > > 6) Pauses in tracks - When I performed a search, it caused to audio > playback to stop. It also took a very long time to return a result. > With no progress indicator, no results shown for a long time, and an > audio dropout, I had assumed the app had crashed. Is the search time > due to the size of the library? Or is something else happening here? > Maybe. And maybe your server is a bit slow. And - agreed - iPeng is quit demanding here, since it starts an incremental search with one character only. Actually it's a bad design on SC's side since iPeng only fetches 8 elements per category and those should really be available fast, but obviously SC does a full query first. I consider doing it the same way as the controller and require two or three characters before starting search.
-- pippin --- see iPeng, the Squeezebox iPhone remote, at penguinlovesmusic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=55514 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
