SubFire 2 collective upgrades...

[acroyear]

So lots of little upgrades to the suite in the last few weeks.

Base, Mobile 2 - Music Folder / Directory cards, clicking the play button will now start playing the album/folder. Clicking the whole card opens the contents as a list. (Album and Artist-Album will get this in the next major change).

Base, Mobile 2, Dash - Playlists view can now click a 'shuffle' button, and then clicking any playlist will shuffle the contents before playing.

All - there is now, in Base and Mobile 2, a remote controller that can play, pause, next, prev, shuffle, and skip to next album when controlling another player. It isn't perfect, and you have to be patient, but it is functional. All 4 players can receive it when they are accepting remote commands.

TV - when not on a TV, it uses the normal dialogs instead of the Android TV layout, I found on mobile devices, that layout was burying the content and difficult to work with.

TV - if you're idle on the main pages while it is playing, it will go back to the player mode after a minute.

Base, Mobile 2 - some new options for playing all albums under and artist, or all files under a music directory, from the main list instead of having to click into the list to get to it.

All - ServiceWorker is set to "skip-waiting", so when you reload soon after I've made an upgrade, it won't stick you with the old version the way it used to.

https://subfiresuite.com/tv https://subfiresuite.com/m2 https://subfiresuite.com/dash https://subfiresuite.com/base

(use http:// if you don't have a secured server)

TV version is available on Amazon App store as SubFire Beta 2

[acroyear]

Firefox is not quite 100% parity with Chrome. Safari and PWA on IOS 12 is ok. I haven't tried IE nor Edge in some time.

[acroyear]

The various apps are now up to Version 2 0.26.x. Here, I now support loading albums and artist-albums as a list of songs, with an extra 'play' button to just play the work outright, bringing the artist/album and album pages in parity with music directories. Albums can be viewed as a grid of covers or as a list, no matter where you are. The main point of this is to eventually support the full desktop player w/ playlist editor that I'm just about ready to start on.

The bookmarks and remote control systems were improved slightly to handle this change.

Also, i now show the album cover on the player in SubFire Dash, as well as faded as the background, and from the burger menu, you can start artist-album or music directory browsing.

[acroyear]

0.27.0 put out some incremental changes around minor bugs, especially in Mobile 2. Dash 2 now supports Artist-Album and Music Directory browsing.

Also, this morning I finally updated the https://subfiresuite.com/ home page with actual pages on the 2.X apps.

Current work in progress:

• Album browsing for TV
• Artist-Album, Music Directory browsing for TV
• Documentation of the Remote Control process
• Documentation of the 7-digit authentication mechanism
• Documentation of the Progressive Web App system
• Document the general Chrome launcher extension
• Restoring the Artist/Album info system for TV (as an option)
• The Desktop player with playlist editing, ability to star and rate, and more...

[acroyear]

0.28.x - mostly upgrades of core components for security and stability.

• Added down-arrows in the radio station page's categories headers to be able to skip without slide-scrolling.
• Cleaned up and better balanced the mobile player 2 layout. Now, the buttons are centered, and the play queue actions are now in the song drawer instead of being an easter egg from tapping the cover. Tapping the cover will slide the main player buttons off to the left in order to give room for picture-in-picture, as I use that space to put google maps's popup while I'm driving.

The rest of the work of late is all behind-the-scenes structural to support making a drag-n-drop playlist editor. Slow going due to the day job, but it'll get there.

[acroyear]

Lots of little updates have happened here and there as I prep up for pushing SubFire 2 as the official app for Fire TV/Stick and Tablets replacing 1 (still need to refine the credentials import to be more user-friendly).

TV: Album browsing is now available. A little rough (going down, as an effect of the scrolling, you sometimes have to click the down button twice to get it to work), but functional.

M2: Now supports landscape mode officially, even in the PWA. Initially I was avoiding this, but the need for it to formally support the Fire tablets (plus it is useful when i'm in the office and my phone's changing orientation constantly) had me work to clean it up and enable the feature.

Quick: Now has buttons to restore the last play queue or see the bookmarks to play from there. Also there's an "easter egg" - clicking near the upper left will reveal action buttons for bookmarks, save play queue, shuffle, jump forward 30 seconds, and skip to the next album. Yes I still need to make a page for the Quick player on my web page.

[acroyear]

SubFire TV (Beta) now has screens for Artist->Album (including artist info) and Indexes->Music Directories. Both will play the album when it is clicked, rather than listing the album's songs (similar to where SubFire 1 was at this point), so if you need more precise playing, I advise using the remote control feature.

This is probably the last feature I need to make the proper 2.0 version of the original SubFire and retire the old interface for good. In testing, I've already integrated the mobile and tv views into a single apk, so I just need to update each to the recent changes, grab some new screenshots, and submit it.