Hi there. I'm using Orange Squeeze Preview for some weeks now. I do kind of like it. Mainly because of the coverart browser. There's nothing else like that on Android.
Though I do think there is quite some improvement potential with Orange Squeeze. I used to use iPeng. Which is IMO still state of the art. By a large margin. However, I'm now on Android and Pippin refuses to launch iPeng for Android. He could have made another fortune. ;) That's why I would like to express some issues and improvment proposals: 1. Pretty inconistant layout. Playback controls general: Controls you'll find on the bottom bar right, then somewhere else (playback) inside a field, in another window (e.g. playlist) they are missing. Why can't you make the controls visible at the same place all the time. This is really annyoing. Especially if you have to access a control quickly. I also don't like the two-stage (click the volume symbol and then access the bar at a (far off) different place) volume control. Have a look at iPeng. These guys have realized that the key functions are volume control, start and stop, next and prev. And these functions require direct access (one-click) all the time. The Orange Squeeze implementation is lightyears back on this. Progressbar: You could put the progress-bar somewhere else ( or introduce an option to turn it off) . It's importance is rather questionable. Beside that when pushing controls it easily happens that you even push the progressbar by accident. This is another pretty weak point. As a beginning you could e.g. replace progress with volume control. Note: If you look at the playback menu (landscape), why can't you list Album,track,artist centered in the right text field!?!? Having it at the top looks not very nice. 2. Switching menus The way I have to switch from album-selection to playback back and forth is inconsistent and annyoing. You can use the android-back, the top-bar-back (redundant!), and even the home-menu. I do consider all this implementation pretty weak. Working with swipes and zones would be much better. 3. Bars, menus,buttons The way to access certain areas is more then inconsistant. The home menu I can access by swipe-right on left side. The playlist I have to push a tiny button on the top bar now ( Why did you change it to the worse just recently !?!?) I do think working with two bars (top bottom) and swipes and Android controls is overkill. Get rid of the top bar at least. Please. Keep it simple and efficient. "Settings" you can put into the home menu, which is accessible with swipe-right. And "Back" on the top-bar-left is kind of redundant to "Android-back" anyhow. How about introducing more swipe functions?? From playback window swipe-left gets me to the playlist, swipe-right to the song-selection (instead of top-bar-left button) 4. Home menu customizations 1. The "pin-to" home menu function is not working correctly. I can not remove and add all the items to the menu. 2. I can not change the order of the home menu items. The first entry in the list is the default start page entry. That I figured out accidently. By accident (by pin and unpin certain functions) I managed to move menu entries around. This way I managed to define my own default start page ( e.g. favorites) You might have a look at this strange behaviour. It's probably a bug. Though I really like to have that home menu and start page customizable. 5. "All Album" view At the end of the and album list/summary view you offer an "All Album" view. That means that I have to go down hundreds of CDs to click that "All Album" function, which basically finally lists the albums in a "proper" and "complete" way. Have a look at iPeng. They put "All Album" choice on top of the displayed list for a reason! Please consider to change this. 6. Color scheme Would be nice if I could change the color of the control bar from brown/orange to black or something else. I know it's matter of taste. So this was a first write up. I hope I'll see some changes sooner or later. Keep up the good work. With the album browser it's imo still the best squeeze controller app on Android. Cheers ::: ' Touch Toolbox and more' (http://soundcheck-audio.blogspot.com) ::: by soundcheck ------------------------------------------------------------------------ soundcheck's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=34383 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97467 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
