XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

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XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby eblade » Wed Feb 15, 2012 7:48 pm

XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS version 1.0 is now available in the HP App Catalog for all current webOS devices, requiring webOS 1.4.5 and up. On webOS 1.4.5 - 2.1, it also requires having the latest HP Maps software update. I believe all versions of 2.2 came with the required toolkits preinstalled.

App Catalog link: https://developer.palm.com/appredirect/ ... icblade.xo
XO home page: http://www.ericbla.de/gvoice-webos/xo/

XO expands on a design loosely based on Sindre's official Android app, but designed to work in a multi-pane system and written from the ground up to offer nearly all of the common features of Subsonic with easy access for both handheld and tablet users.

That said, there is a LOT of functionality packed into the small space afforded, some of which is not immediately obvious.

On tablets, you can drag and drop songs from the Music or Search tab directly into the playlist in any order that you'd like, to organize the playlist to your taste. At the moment, re-ordering the playlist is not possible, however what you can do, is save the playlist that you have created to the server, load it into the music tab, clear the existing one, and completely re-arrange it.

On all devices, holding (long press) on a song or video item will bring up a menu of choices for the context of the item. If you want to download a song to your device, for example, you can hit the Search tab, search for it, when you find it, hold (long press) on the song in the search list, and select "Download". This will download the song from your Subsonic server to your device, automatically indexing it into the stock webOS media index for playback via the stock music player app.

To remove an individual song from your playlist, you can swipe it left or right from the "Now Playing" tab. To delete a playlist from the server, you can swipe it left or right from the Playlists tab. To add an entire album to your playlist, select that album in the Music view, once the list of songs on that album is displayed, press the "Add All" button in the lower left hand corner.

Tapping a song in the Music list will add it to the Now Playing list, and turn it green in the Music view.

The toolbar buttons on the bottom should light up as they are needed - the Playlist/Now Playing controls will only appear, for example, when you have songs loaded in your Now Playing list.

Jukebox (server control) is also available - on tablets, this appears as a flipswitch in the bottom right hand corner of the toolbar, if your user account is configured for Jukebox access. On phone devices, it is on the App Menu, which you can get to like any other app, by tapping the upper left hand corner, and selecting Jukebox.

When in Jukebox mode, the player controls the Subsonic server identically as if it were playing locally, keeping a completely individual playlist and such completely seperate from the on-device controls. In fact, you can start a list playing on your phone or tablet, switch to Jukebox control, edit a playlist on the server, start it playing, and switch back to your local device, all without any of the songs ever stopping.

Video playback can be done through the TouchPlayer app, available here: http://mobilecoder.wordpress.com/2011/1 ... mentation/
Or, if your device is webOS 2.0 or better, it can use the Flash player to playback. (TouchPlayer generally works better, if you have it, but it will fall back to Flash if necessary)

Video playback is likely best done by not using the playlist, but rather by hold/long-pressing on the video in question, and selecting "Play Now".

Questions, comments, concerns, etc, please let me know. And don't forget to leave a review on the catalog ;)
eblade
 
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby bobdylansdead » Mon Feb 27, 2012 6:19 pm

The usefulness of my touchpad has more than doubled since XO came out. I have been using it since before it showed up as a pay app on the app store, but now of course I am a paying customer. I saw that no one has replied to this, so I just wanted to say thanks keep up the good development on XO. It's great!
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby eblade » Fri Mar 02, 2012 7:00 am

I hope to have time this weekend to fix the problems that I've found in Jukebox mode, and get that out to the people. Thanks for the support :)
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby Pulp » Fri Mar 02, 2012 1:15 pm

First of all, thank you for creating such an amazing app for webOS! I'm using it on my Pre3 and TouchPad and I absolutely love it! :)

I found two bugs while using it on the touchpad, it would be great if you could address them in a future update:

  • While playing in Jukebox mode the homescreen keeps constantly refreshing, causing the screen to "flicker", does not seem to happen when replay is paused and also not when playing on the device.
  • Some special characters like ÄÖÜäöü are not displayed properly but instead the html code is displayed (but not correctly translated to the actual character).
    For. ex.: 'Blue Öyster Cult ' is displayed as 'Blue Öyster Cult'.
Would be great if you could fix these when you find the time!

Thanks for the great work!
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby eblade » Fri Mar 02, 2012 7:08 pm

Yeah the home tab refresh is the status indicator, it needs some re-working, and a more visible location, I guess. I wonder if I can squeeze it in on the bottom toolbar instead of lamely attached to the server button. Or put it in as some kind of an overlay in a corner or something. I do know about the special characters, but I'm not certain what needs to be done. I do know I need to get a problem with scrolling on the Jukebox playlist solved.. Now that it's clear that Enyo 2.0 won't contain all of the various UI bits needed for at least a little while longer ,I plan to maintain this UI a little more, although I do want to move to the new framework as soon as it's strong enough to support.
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby eblade » Sat Mar 03, 2012 7:04 pm

Moved status indicator to bottom right corner, added multiple server capability. Did not have an entire day to spend testing across a wide range of devices, so hopefully that doesn't break anything. New update submitted to HP and RIM, pending their approvals.
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby Pulp » Sun Mar 04, 2012 7:15 pm

Thank you, looking forward to it!
Is there a chance you will add SSL support aswell? If I enable it on the server I cannot seem to connect anymore with my touchpad.
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby eblade » Mon Mar 05, 2012 4:41 am

The current version (and the update) actually force http at the moment, because https is pretty much non-working. It appears because of the certificate situation, that webOS believes that the subsonic server's certificate is not valid, and there's no way for an end-user to allow it, since it's not running in the browser. Something like that, anyway.

So far, using "normal" methods, I'm not able to get a connection. I DO have a method to work around this, which I developed for my Google Voice app, however it will take some time to implement, and at the moment, my app programming time is limited to weekends, and the weekends have been pretty busy lately with other things. I expect probably a full weekend will be needed to get that in there, and it may require re-building the playback mechanism to download-cache a file before starting it .. which is probably not a bad idea in any case, but is quite different from how the current version works.

I had hoped to be updating to Enyo 2.0 already, too, but there's really not enough components yet to put together a UI, and I'm kind of terrible with styling on my own.. so that does at least leave more time for the functionality side :D
eblade
 
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby Pulp » Wed Mar 07, 2012 10:05 pm

Ouch, the latest update broke the app for me :/

I can no longer list any song from any album when selected from the list on the home-tab - it freezes with the spinner turning and no content is displayed.
I also can no longer search for albums/artist - it only displays results for songs (these can then be played).

I verified it happens with the demo-server aswell.

Sadly, in its current state, the app is not usable :(

Update: maybe this helps - if searching for a single letter it displays content with that letter if its a single letter, but nothing else (for ex searching for D displays "Tenatious D" & albums and all songs containing "D"; searching for tenatious displays nothing :o)
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby eblade » Thu Mar 08, 2012 10:20 pm

Shipping an update in a few minutes that will hopefully fix that. My sincerest apologies!

I hope this will get out before the weekend. Sorry for the problem :(

Feel free to contact me from the support button on the App Catalog, also.
eblade
 
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby eblade » Tue Mar 13, 2012 11:57 pm

Fix is out. I will hopefully be shipping another one with more good stuff soon, but I really want to track down this problem with the Playlist not scrolling in Jukebox mode before i do.
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby eblade » Sun Apr 01, 2012 11:02 pm

I've got partial https/SSL support working, although it does not at the moment stream media from it - going to need to design some kind of a caching mechanism since I don't currently have one. I'd honestly hope that the next update to the subsonic server comes out before I get that released, since that has much much smaller object identification strings. :)

If anyone is interested in testing it, please let me know. Of course I'll be working on getting it to be able to -play- in the future :)
eblade
 
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby Weidbrewer » Tue May 15, 2012 1:01 pm

Just found/purchased this last night. I've become quite addicted to Subsonic in its various forms and was glad to find it on my TP.

I haven't gotten to play around with it yet, as I discovered it completely by accident just before bed. I was able to connect to my server without issue (once I remembered that it was subsonic.org, not .com...) and played some files, as well as testing the download function. A few observations so far - and these are just to polish, mind you, as the app is already pretty damn sweet:

*Menus are a bit sluggish, but that's probably a function of WebOS rather than the app.
*An error message when you can't connect. That .org/.com thing above had me thinking the app didn't work for about 15 minutes until I figured it out
*The ability to DL on the Album level rather than individual songs.

Other than that, with my limited use, I say well done, sir. Well done.
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby eblade » Mon Jun 04, 2012 1:53 am

Sorry I haven't been in this thread for a while -- my family and I moved a couple weeks ago, and it's taken up all my spare time that wasn't for my regular work.

Good suggestions, Weidbrewer. Not sure what device you have or which menus you're talking about, but for the most part, it's pretty fast on my TouchPad and Pre3. Pre and Pre2 are definitely helped if you overclock them. Not that I'm suggesting you should overclock your phone just to run my app ;)

I'll see if I can get a timeout mechanism into the connection, by default it either waits a ridiculously long time, or it never returns, I'm not sure which.

I'm re-tooling in Enyo 2.0, right now, which will have some .. interesting.. side effects, i'm sure. For the moment, I've sort-of cloned the 1.0 UI into Enyo 2.0, with a few moves of things that will hopefully improve upon things once I figure out how best to connect them. Basically, the UI is same as it was before (although quite a bit rougher, as the styles haven't been worked out yet), except that the Player is a seperate view from everything else, instead of being attached to the same view as the Now Playing list.

I would definitely love to hear suggestions, before I get too far into implementing things ;) you can mess with it at http://ericbla.de/xo2/ . If you have a TouchPad, it should work there, or in virtually any browser at the moment. The UI still works on the webOS phones, but it wont' work from the browser.

This version will definitely do caching of results from the server, so it will be possible to implement Album level things. When I get to implementing the communications side of it, I intend to do so in a fashion that will hopefully make SSL a possibility as well, since I won't be having to insert it in to replace an existing system.

* edit: Also, a recent update was pushed for XO for both PlayBook and webOS, which should fix some problems with supporting the 4.7 server, as well as some new features that were implemented on it.
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Re: XO: Subsonic Commander for webOS

Postby Weidbrewer » Mon Jun 18, 2012 4:59 pm

eblade wrote:Not sure what device you have or which menus you're talking about


Touchpad, OC'd Like I said, I think it's more of a factor of WebOS, as there are just places where this OS bogs down in general.

Also, a recent update was pushed for XO for both PlayBook and webOS, which should fix some problems with supporting the 4.7 server, as well as some new features that were implemented on it.


Hmm...haven't gotten any notifications for updates. I'll have to check that when I get home.
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