Intone - the future and help needed

Yogiz yogizz at gmail.com
Sun Apr 12 11:14:39 CEST 2009


Hi,

My $0.02 follows:

On Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:29:50 -0700 (PDT)
c_c <cchandel at yahoo.com> wrote:


>   1. Prevent suspend when playing songs and pause on incomnig call
> (dbus stuff)
Good idea although I'm not quite sure FSO framework is quite perfect
for it yet. As I understand you can set the auto-suspending to off when
Intone is started and return to its former value when it's closing. If
Intone crashes or is killed however, the auto-suspending option will
remain off, even if that wasn't intended. It probably still how it
should be implemented now, I'd just like the framework to add something
like for GPS for the disable suspend option. Something like that if
anyone is using the no-suspend option then it's on and once everyone is
disconnected from it, the default is returned, not matter if the app
exited gracefully. That's not your problem however, I'm just ranting
off. I should probably discuss it in the framework mailing list.

> 2. Album art  - an optional view that shows the album
> cover and meta information about the playing song. Also - the icon
> then changes to show the cover for songs whose album art is available
Yeah, nice idea, but I'll consider it a feature creep if the player
will attempt to connect to the network. I think a nice approach would
be to simply look for album.jpg or something the like in the album
directory and use that. There could be a second app for automatically
downloading the album art. Don't build it into the player however. The
player should be there to play songs, not fool around on the
Internet : ).

> 3. Lyrics - an optional view that shows lyrics for the playing song
Ditto. If local songname-lyrics.txt file exists, use that, otherwise
disregard. The second app could be used for downloading the lyrics. For
both of the above, the "find corresponding file from the same folder"
would probably not work if there is no directory structure. The extra
app for downloading album art and lyrics should probably save the
downloaded information straight to the database and give the
downloaded files unique names if they are not in separate folders.

> 4. map the aux button to choose between 3 diff volume levels in
> rotation - or 1 click for next song and 2 for the last song - Any
> opinions?
Actually I hate when apps start fooling around with my input controls.
I currently put Intone in the playing mode, then use the aux button to
lock the phone so I can leave it safely in my pocket. I'd rather it
didn't change that. The aux button is too small anyway, no chance of
pressing it when phone's in the pocket, if it's out, no problem using
the touch screen.

> 5. Ability to manage, download and play podcasts from
> intone (or should it be a diff app catering to podcasts only?)
My opinion is that it should be a different app alltogether. Amarok and
the like are fun beasts but this is embedded we're talking about. Let
your app do one thing and do it well : ).

> 6. A
> seperate app (mostly Intone) to manage and play videos (using
> mplayer-xgalmo).
Yeah why not. You did well on finger-friendly GUI design on Intone, we
could probably use a video player like that as well. I'd suggest you
concentrate on Intone for now however and leave the video player for
later when perhaps someone can optimize video playing enough to make it
really feasable on the Freerunner. So far I don't see it, I do see the
feasability of an audio player though.

> Anything other interesting and needed feature that
> comes up based on your feedback (graphic eq maybe?)
I think the first priority should be bug fixing and integrating to the
framework via DBus. As for features, perhaps a full screen mode where
the whole screen is just big buttons and no output. I'm not sure this
is needed however, the input was probably good enough for now. What I
wouldn't mind would be compiling the artists, albums and songs using
corresponding tags on both mp3-s and ogg-s instead of just directory
structure. I never bothered to move my music around so on the
Freerunner it's all piled together into a single folder. My tags are
healthy however and organizing based on that would be nice. I suggest
that the only time you'd need to look for the tags would be when
importing new music. Then it can all be saved in the database and save
on resources. There could be a out-of-sight button for re-reading tags
on selected songs in case you've changed them however. The latter of
course is a low priority but the tag system itself would be good.

Perhaps there should be automatic directory structure creation as well
on importing songs - toggleable certainly. I find it hard to get only
the songs I want on the freerunner while keeping the directory
structure in place.

No more ideas for now. I'll try to investigate that database bug and
recreate it. I'll let you know if I manage to find out how it happens
or if I have any other ideas.

Thanks and regards,
Yogiz




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