SubFire 1.8.5 released

[acroyear]

Fixes:

• Album Skip (skips past all tracks in the same album and goes on to the first track from a differnet album)
• Full Screen support for Firefox for Android
• Support for block party, max songs in radio generator from SubFire Radio
• Support for using station tags as dividers
• Fixed bug where Save Play Queue button didn't work

Deployed to Web and Chrome, submitted to Amazon and should be published within a day or so.

Minor start-up hiccup: first time you go to 'Radio', it may appear empty. Simply flip to another tab (Artist, Albums, Folders), then up to 'Refresh' (upper right corner), then you can go back to Radio tab and it should work. I've no idea what the cause is, because it only ever happens *once*. Once it is right on an environment, it seems to stay right.

[acroyear]

Fixed the minor hiccup. deployed to the web and submitting to the Chrome and Amazon.

[acroyear]

Just for the sake of testing, I've verified that the web version of SubFire (including radio modes) works with the latest Opera (based on Chromium 52) and Microsoft Edge. I'm considering packaging the code for Opera's app store, but after my pending vacation.

[acroyear]

1.8.5.2 released: fixed a bug where if you skipped through tracks in the queue listing of the player, you could get stuck in "Loading..." and it would just keep playing the same track over and over.

Note to self: string + integer => stringinteger. Javascript is fun.

Deployed to all platforms.

Got word that the Android WebView based on Chromium 53 will finally resolve the constant bit rate playback issues that I've had to work around in Android Chrome 51 and earlier, and in FireOS, so when 53 is released, I may make it available as a side-loaded APK or a Google Play Store installed app.

[Override92]

Hello acroyear,

why can't I connect to my server with self signed cert?

//Override

[acroyear]

Basically, self-signed certs aren't considered "trusted" by the browsers and vendors. Yeah, YOU trust yours, but in general if a public page just happens to have a cert that isn't signed by an authority, it can appear like it should be trusted by actually be harmful.

Being an html5 app, I am not in control in any way of overriding the webview's policy on accepting self-signed certs.

On Chrome (both web and app), it should accept the if you have created a permanent exception to the cert in the browser by connecting directly to your subsonic server in the same browser at some point.

I do not know if Firefox allows that exception to be permanent anymore, though it used to. I have not tried IE or Edge with a self-signed cert yet.

On android and fire tablets, it is possible (but tedious) to add your own cert to the tablet's internal store, allowing access, but I've never tried it. I've read from one site that it *may* be possible to do it on a Fire TV, but there is no way to do it on the Fire Stick. Amazon has not indicated that they will ever give up that security restriction.

There really is nothing I can do right now. If the platform won't accept the cert, that is by their design, not mine.

Pure native apps have more internal control over that. If I were to package my app differently for Fire, through phonegap instead of using Amazon's app deployment, I may be able to override the setting...or I may get in trouble because it may be a violation of Amazon Fire policy. In addition, it would require me to deploy it as a new app, disconnecting existing users from automatic upgrades. Not currently a risk-benefit gamble I want to take at this time.

[acroyear]

Actually, I just read on a PhoneGap discussion: even if I were to add the flag to allow the Android/Fire version to use self-signed certs, the flag would immediately be caught by both app stores and the application rejected.

They really consider it unsafe to do allow it.

[acroyear]

hmm...so how does one debug a safari app on IOS I wonder.

Finally ran SubFire in Safari on an IOS 9 device (as opposed to my ancient IOS 4 ipod touch) and, well, stuff don't work. Within the browser, things are ok except that auto-capitalization and auto-correct make it nearly impossible to enter a domain name or user name, so I wonder how to turn those off just for those text fields. The polyfills I have for fetch and promise don't seem to work, either, so the 'radio' page doesn't work.

If I "add to home", it does do what I want (puts the icon on the home screen, opens "full screen" without the address bar and tabs, so it is obeying the manifest), but as soon as I try to play something, the window just vanishes.

Oh well. I'll hit up Dr. Google on some of those later.
Joe

[acroyear]

1.8.5.5 released. Chrome and Amazon Fire versions should be up soon after approval, web version is up now.

This fixes some minor issues with album info display, some CSS hackery for smaller widths, and adds support for a new SubFire Radio station-generator type.

General development slowed down due to my busy fall schedule, but should pick up in the winter. I'm working on several big projects right now.
* Packaging the application in Electron for OSX and Windows, due to Chrome dropping app support for those platforms (those jerks...).
* A new "10 foot" interface for TV mode, to also be the basis for a Chromecast client.
* A new tablet/portrait interface. (both based on 'material design'
* Options to toggle some of the features (like the color changing).
* A "night mode" that darkens the background colors and makes the cover image more opaque (yes, I drive with this as my app all the time).
* A "remote control" feature to allow casting to other SubFire clients.

All that, basically a total UI rewrite, is the basis for 2.0, which i hope to beta by New Years and release by March.

In addition, I started work on a playlist editor which I hope to get back to finishing.

Finally there's a minor improvement in SubFire Radio which I'll detail in another post.

[acroyear]

1.8.5.6 released, primarily for Amazon Fire. Now, any play queue has appended to it a 2 second file of silence so that the audio tag is able to properly reset itself before looping back. If there was only one file in the queue, Fire would get hung up badly (repeating the first 3 seconds of a piece like a broken vinyl record).

Since my kid likes to hear a single song over and over, it got very frustrating having to go reset it every time the bug happened.

The artist/title/album stuff is 'rough' and I'll tweak it for the next release.

[acroyear]

1.8.5.7 - minor update with the "silence" feature for fixing Fire: it renders better than saying "Silence...", and only is added when it needs to be (when there's only one item in the play queue). Also, the radio "Artist Songs" and "Artist Albums" generators will filter the contents by the artist one last time before adding.

This fixes the issue where an artist has a song in a compilation album (decade hits or movie soundtrack) and because of that, the rest of the songs that aren't from that artist also get included. I may not yet have that posted to SubFireRadio itself, but will very soon.

[acroyear]

I've put out SubFire 1.8.6, which

• adds a 'replay 10 seconds' button, which I need for my kid using the player for backing tracks when she's practicing her instruments
• improves the recovery when Fire TV kicks in the screen saver or if you press the mic button.

For FireTV, I still can't easily resolve the problem where the screensaver kicks on in the first place. Amazon refuses to consider that a bug or design problem on their part.