All things NAS - Page 2

tormodnt · 05-02-2008, 05:58 PM

Since I haven't got the chance to test it yet, I'm instead going to make some suggestions on things to do.. *lol*

It could be that this alredy are, but on the last image I saw it was not.
Added "artist name" and "album name" in coverflow window, and "now playing" + "next song" below the coverflow window:

Next, added a "track list" button, that when trigged shows a window with the track playing and so on. It has buttons so that you can step up and down on list, and it shows album art on images on track list (in this example it plays a certain album, if shuffle it would of course show the shuffle list with cover art showing on each song):

Maybe, there should have been a "page down" and a "page up" arrow buttons there as well.

Sorry to do this in the middle of the bug fixing but this is things that I really miss in itunes, and that would make the cover flow experience a lot better and user friendly..

btw, do play button change to "pause" if the player plays a song? that would be a must.. (or a separate button for that)

natedawgg · 05-02-2008, 08:47 PM

thanks for the input and ideas. most of the features you are asking for are currently present in one form or another. there are now the album names in cover flow. if you select an album to play via coverflow you can click the coverFlow button which would have changed to "list view" to view the current album's list of songs with the current song playing. when a song is playing the name of the song will display along with the artist who sings it. play button does change to pause. i am planning to implement these and other features as time goes, but obviously first i will get the stupid thing actually working for everybody.

once again thanks for the input. i would love to eventually implement them all in some way, until then i will be bug fixing.

natedawgg · 05-03-2008, 02:20 PM

just letting everybody know that there is a new version ready to be downloaded. this version makes the app usable on a windows machine. it also improves reliablity for the mac platform, so all users should download the new version.

Mobiuslogic · 05-09-2008, 03:09 PM

1) playlist support? I find this crucial, I have driving playlists, softer music playlists, favorites, etc.
2) Ok, I selected an artist, album, song. It played about ten seconds of it (until the progress bar was full) then skipped to the next song, ten seconds, next, ten seconds. random clicking got me back to the first song, and the progress bar moved PAST the box and moved all the way across the screen... while playing the song in full. A third attempt to play the song resulted in a normally paced progress bar, and playing the whole song. This seems to be an issue with using the "NEXT" button. Yep, I was able to reliably reproduce these by using the "NEXT" button.
3) A second press of ATT does not return the volume to normal. VERY thoughtful feature btw imho ftw
4) Is it a limitation of AIR that holding "vol up" will not cause a continuous press? That would be nice, too.
5) Shuffle: functional in this version? I couldn't tell what/if it shuffled. An indicator of it being on or off would be nice.
6) Ability to sort by artist/genre/title/album would be cool but not nescessary.

So far, though, it kicks donkey. Can't wait for the next update.

natedawgg · 05-09-2008, 03:46 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by Mobiuslogic

1) playlist support? I find this crucial, I have driving playlists, softer music playlists, favorites, etc.

this will be implemented in the very near future. i am considering 2 things in this area. the first is being able to make a playlist from within the app (very simple to implement on my side). second importing playlists from itunes or whatever other program a playlist is made in (much harder for me to implement, although not impossible by any means)

what would you guys like? i am assuming both, so that is what direction i am heading at the moment

Quote:

2) Ok, I selected an artist, album, song. It played about ten seconds of it (until the progress bar was full) then skipped to the next song, ten seconds, next, ten seconds. random clicking got me back to the first song, and the progress bar moved PAST the box and moved all the way across the screen... while playing the song in full. A third attempt to play the song resulted in a normally paced progress bar, and playing the whole song. This seems to be an issue with using the "NEXT" button. Yep, I was able to reliably reproduce these by using the "NEXT" button.

this is a known bug that i have been running into. it is caused by the way flash player 9 handles music. there is one way to play a .mp3 file and whole other way to play something like a .m4a file. very weird and it has been causing some real issues for me. the other part of the issue for the progress bar is caused because it takes a moment for flash to get the length of the song from the id3 tag and so it screws up the progress bar. i have pretty much already fixed that bug and that will be in the next update.

speaking of update. air provides a nice auto-update feature that will allow the app (when connected to the internet) to check and see if it is current and if not it will automatically download and install the newest version. I am going to implement this for the next beta release.

Quote:

3) A second press of ATT does not return the volume to normal. VERY thoughtful feature btw imho ftw

this was a speed to release problem. i was coding to fast to stop and think of basic functionality. this also will be fixed in the next release

Quote:

4) Is it a limitation of AIR that holding "vol up" will not cause a continuous press? That would be nice, too.

im not sure if that is an air problem or not. i honestly never thought of that, but i will look into it further, the must be a way. and honestly the volume controls are only for the flash player and not the actual system (os volume). i am not 100% sure but i dont think air can give access to system info such as volume. it was designed to have the system volume at 100% and then control the music inside flash.

Quote:

5) Shuffle: functional in this version? I couldn't tell what/if it shuffled. An indicator of it being on or off would be nice.

shuffle has not been implemented yet. the button is just a place holder until i can acutally implement that feature

Quote:

6) Ability to sort by artist/genre/title/album would be cool but not nescessary.

i agree and it should not be too difficult to add, however it will rely completely on the individual file's meta data or id3 tag. the problem that i am running into is getting the metadata from a .aac, m4a song. .mp3 work fine however. i will look into this more but it will take some time.

Mobiuslogic · 05-09-2008, 04:11 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by natedawgg

this will be implemented in the very near future. i am considering 2 things in this area. the first is being able to make a playlist from within the app (very simple to implement on my side). second importing playlists from itunes or whatever other program a playlist is made in (much harder for me to implement, although not impossible by any means)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but most people using your app will be using it with an independent computer system hooked up to their car, and not using it with iTunes very much. Therefore, I think the ability to create and save playlists instantly from within the app would be much more useful than integrating it with iTunes, where any changes to the playlist would be done on the iTunes side then ported to your front end.

Quote: Originally Posted by natedawgg

speaking of update. air provides a nice auto-update feature that will allow the app (when connected to the internet) to check and see if it is current and if not it will automatically download and install the newest version. I am going to implement this for the next beta release.

Auto-update is King.

Quote: Originally Posted by natedawgg

this was a speed to release problem. i was coding to fast to stop and think of basic functionality.

No worries. That's why you have beta-testers like us to do your proofreading. You do your thing, we'll do ours. You code, we'll check. You're doing an awesome job imho.

Quote: Originally Posted by natedawgg

im not sure if that is an air problem or not. i honestly never thought of that, but i will look into it further, the must be a way. and honestly the volume controls are only for the flash player and not the actual system (os volume). i am not 100% sure but i dont think air can give access to system info such as volume. it was designed to have the system volume at 100% and then control the music inside flash.

I don't mind leaving the system volume at a constant 100% and using the flash player's volume control. I was turning up the volume after the ATT button, and discovered that I needed to click a whole bunch of times to raise the volume.

I think most (not including me) people will also be considering an external control knob for volume on their systems.

Quote: Originally Posted by natedawgg

shuffle has not been implemented yet. the button is just a place holder until i can acutally implement that feature

That's ok. That would probably come at the same time as the playlists (to shuffle within a playlist/artist, etc.) Don't forget repeat modes: repeat one, repeat disk/playlist/artist, repeat all.

Quote: Originally Posted by natedawgg

i agree and it should not be too difficult to add, however it will rely completely on the individual file's meta data or id3 tag. the problem that i am running into is getting the metadata from a .aac, m4a song. .mp3 work fine however. i will look into this more but it will take some time.

No worries. I think playlists would be priority over this, so take your time.

Also, I know this is thinking really far ahead, but does AIR support smooth and nice animations such as a "ripple" animation if you click on the screen? Eventually it'd be nice to have customizable skins or background pics and cool little animations.

ACTUALLY that brings up a good point: visualizers/slideshows? I know you're focusing on the audio app right now, but have you given any thought into being able to throw up a visualizer or slideshow while your music is playing? Just a thought.

Mobiuslogic · 05-09-2008, 04:17 PM

Oh, I did notice the smooth slide-down effect you put on the opening "select library" screen... nice touch. Just wanted to point it out so that you didn't think it went unnoticed.

NeonDev · 05-09-2008, 05:02 PM

it would be nice to be able to turn off the button rollover so that people with a touch screen don't always have a lit button after poking a said button. not a big deal tho

I don't know if all touch screens move the mouse when you click but the ones here sure do (all running windows)

Mobiuslogic · 05-09-2008, 07:11 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by NeonDev

it would be nice to be able to turn off the button rollover so that people with a touch screen don't always have a lit button after poking a said button. not a big deal tho

I don't know if all touch screens move the mouse when you click but the ones here sure do (all running windows)

LOL- that's a "feature" of touchscreens. It helpfully informs you what the last button you pressed was by leaving it highlighted.

Good point to bring up though. I'm going to have to find a script that turns the cursor off when the front end software is running... so I can use the CarMac and the front end without a dangling cursor.

natedawgg · 05-10-2008, 12:32 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Mobiuslogic

Correct me if I'm wrong, but most people using your app will be using it with an independent computer system hooked up to their car, and not using it with iTunes very much. Therefore, I think the ability to create and save playlists instantly from within the app would be much more useful than integrating it with iTunes, where any changes to the playlist would be done on the iTunes side then ported to your front end.

That was my thought process as well, so i will deff implement the creation of playlists within the app.

Quote:

Also, I know this is thinking really far ahead, but does AIR support smooth and nice animations such as a "ripple" animation if you click on the screen? Eventually it'd be nice to have customizable skins or background pics and cool little animations.

yes air does support animations and lots of them. these are the goodies that i want to add in the near future, but was unable to earlier just because i wanted the app to actually work before i made it super pretty. Since air(and subsequently adobe Flex) are using flash player, it supports any custom animation you can think of, and then actually create. every action that can be performed in Flex can have some kind of animation applied to it. this can be a bad thing given that people can be animation crazy and end up with an unusable ugly distracting app. in my case i can promise you that that will not happen. I assure you however that things will be much more smooth looking in the near future.

Quote:

ACTUALLY that brings up a good point: visualizers/slideshows? I know you're focusing on the audio app right now, but have you given any thought into being able to throw up a visualizer or slideshow while your music is playing? Just a thought.

yes. i have actually been giving that a lot of thought. i havent given the slideshow idea much thought just because i personally don't keep pics on my car pc, but it is very doable. as far as visualizations go, i am working out the algorithms to make those a reality. air gives me good acces to the sound spectrum while playing a sound, so that should make visualizers much easier to create

Quote: Originally Posted by Mobiuslogic

Oh, I did notice the smooth slide-down effect you put on the opening "select library" screen... nice touch. Just wanted to point it out so that you didn't think it went unnoticed.

thank you, although as much as i would like to take credit for that, i can't. that effect comes built into the file system display component. somebody else did the legwork, i just benifited from it. glad you like it though, because i will be adding more animations to the rest of the app shortly

Quote: Originally Posted by NeonDev

it would be nice to be able to turn off the button rollover so that people with a touch screen don't always have a lit button after poking a said button. not a big deal tho

I don't know if all touch screens move the mouse when you click but the ones here sure do (all running windows)

thanks for bringing that to my attention. currently my mini has a fried logic board (consequently if anybody knows where i can get a logic board for a 1.66ghz mini on the cheap i would really appreciate it) , so i am unable to test in the actual car enviorment (hence the reliance on you kind folks) with a touch screen. the problem seems evident enough though and easy to fix. the buttons are just standard issue buttons given in the flex ide. they come with standard states (i.e. up, over, down, hit) with each having its own look. i will just go in and make the "over" state look just like the "up" state since with a touch screen there never really is a "over" state anyway. will be fixed in next update

thank you guys for your sharp eyes. please dont hesitate to bring a like/dislike/idea to my attention, it helps everybody in the long run!

natedawgg · 05-17-2008, 12:50 AM

just giving everybody a little update here for the weekend. this is effectively a small update with only minor bug fixes and some cosmetic tweaks. among the updates are the following

-shuffle now works
-ATT button now returns volume to it's original level
-added icons to buttons on music page
-fixed a bug with coverflow not loading all instances of albums
-fixed other minor bugs involving error handling
-if you are noticing that coverflow is stacking all the images on top of each other instead of to the side, click the "day" button and that should temp fix the problem. i am looking into the cause of this bug

oh yeah the name of the app is now NASair, since media car is taken and i am really not that creative with naming (i was just thinking of naming it BOB and be done with it)

below are some screen shots of the new icons

you can download the latest version on the first post

NeonDev · 05-17-2008, 09:22 AM

why are there 3 volume buttons? are the just 3 predetermined levels of volume or is one supposed to be mute?

Like the glow on the shuffle button btw

natedawgg · 05-17-2008, 10:34 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by NeonDev

why are there 3 volume buttons? are the just 3 predetermined levels of volume or is one supposed to be mute?

Like the glow on the shuffle button btw

that is correct. The last button drops the vol down to 10% but now that I think about it, it might as well just mute.

Mobiuslogic · 05-19-2008, 07:05 AM

I just updated the new beta and was playing around. In the first 3 minutes, I noticed that

1) Shuffle, next, back buttons appear to work somewhat sporatically. 80% of the time they did what I expected. 20% it seemed that if shuffle was on, it wouldn't go to the next track, if shuffle was off, it would, and with shuffle on, it still bounced around the tracks in order. That's ok for now, though. I know you're still working on it.

2) I tried to click the coverflow view and completely froze it up. I suspect that has something to do with having 3037 songs, for 13.46 gigs of music, and random/broken album art for all of it. Also, I didn't use the "decode album art" and didn't give it time to finish... i was doing other things too so I force-quit.

3) Cosmetically, I like night mode better than day, but I haven't tested them in full sunlight yet. Also, the attenuation button was clearer as "ATT"... as pointed out by NeonDev, it's a little confusing as it is with the three different sizes. The buttons, however, are touchscreen-friendly and that is very welcome.

As always, don't focus on the cosmetics. You just keep coding that functionality in. Keep up the good work and if you get behind on your progress I'll send you 1,000 PMs a day until you update the beta download.

More seriously, though, I'm glad you're doing this. Curious, unless I missed something, why NAS? I know why the name change, I mean why "NAS"? What stand for?

....AND one more thing. Version numbers? NASv0.03.air.zip or something... if you can and if you feel like it. Eventually, versions are going to get a bit complicated so might be good to get in the habit of, no? Also, it's easier/easiest to keep track of having the newest one (short of an email notification list) if we can see the version number on the download. Also, if someone comes up with a bizarre bug, you can see if they're running the newest version or not. Just a thought.

Mobiuslogic · 05-19-2008, 07:19 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by natedawgg

that is correct. The last button drops the vol down to 10% but now that I think about it, it might as well just mute.

Not mute. I like still hearing the song, especially if I press ATT to have a quick conversation about directions or order at the drive-through. Better than mute, I think.

Although, when you get to preferences and a built in .plist editor, being able to switch the ATT button between Mute and Attenuation would be good. That way everyone can have their cake.

Maybe change the ATT symbol to a line art symbol of an ear or a mouth with sound, indicating that "press this button if you wish to hear things" or "press this button if you wish to speak things". This would allow it to be mute or attenuation without changing the icon.