SubFire Mobile Alpha Preview

[acroyear]

In working on SubFire 2 for FireTV and Chromecast, I increasingly found that trying to make a layout that worked perfectly in both TV-Landscape and Phone-Portrait (how I use SubFire in the car on my commutes) just was getting too difficult.

So after having put together a simple react/material-ui app for my kid (a music-playing tooth-brushing timer!), I opted to stage together a brand new Progressive Web App player in the same framework.

It is currently in a very rough preview mode. I'm aware of how much of a pain it is to enter the login details.

http://subfiresuite.com/m

Load it up in Chrome for Android and then "Add To Home Page" for an icon that launches it full-screen. No service worker yet (haven't found a need for one). It won't look terribly good in landscape mode and I'm not likely to do much about that, because SubFire 2 will be optimized for landscape TVs, Tablets, and desktop browsers.

Currently it only plays playlists, and for the "radio" page, it uses the cached playlist generated at SubFire Radio - it doesn't yet regenerate on the fly. The Player page needs a bit of work in layout and color (it doesn't do the background-changing I like in SubFire 1), but functionally works. Play/Pause, next/prev, shuffle.

After it is stable and complete, I may explore other packagings like electron, a chrome extension launcher (no more new Chrome apps), or using phonegap to make an apk. But in my experience, just having it be a PWA in Chrome is more than functional enough for a typical Android phone.

It mostly will work the way I want in Samsung's browser for Android 6. Firefox won't get the right icon (not yet sure why), nor will it support the fullscreen manifest setting (and I've no idea when they'll support it - even Aurora still isn't there yet).

Features to come:

• Radio on-the-fly generation
• Album query grid with "infinite scrolling"
• Artist/Album ID3 browsing
• General folder browsing
• Player layout and color
• A "night mode" that reduces the brightness of the colors and album cover
• Play skip to next album
• Loading spinners and error dialogs
• Continue saved play queue
• Subsonic 6.1 improved bookmarks
• https hosting (it will, like SubFire 1, have difficulties in handling self-signed certs - I am constrained by the browser).
• Chromecast serving
• The new Media Session API

And that'll be about it. Goal is something simple for the car or the night-stand...although that's pretty close to the feature set in SubFire itself.

[acroyear]

updated - improved stability (though still don't really have decent error reporting at all), improved player page colors w/ gradients from SubFire, and a slider for viewing/setting position in the file (not yet rendering the actual time/duration, but that'll come soon).

[acroyear]

Lots of progress. Rewrote the routing engine to react-router for more stability. radio stations now generate dynamically.

Now working on artist-album (id3) browsing and internet radio (I want to find a way to 'register' a fav picture: i get bored just staring at my own icon for the half hour I'm listening to muppets ).

Still need to work around the issue of the login screen and small devices.

[acroyear]

Oh, and there's now a chrome extension, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subfire-mini-player-for-s/lgmcdgockngoegbneiojikkkekoknabm at the Google Chrome Store.

This time it is just an extension to open the webapp in the right-size window, rather than an app like SubFire 1, since Chrome is removing the app functionality from all but Chromebooks.

[acroyear]

Updates:

• "Lowsrc" images - loads a lower-res version of the playlist/station image before loading the full - 180px took longer than expected compared to the 45 the old one loaded, at least on a phone network.
• Infinite-Scrolling - Playlists and stations now expand as you scroll down instead of trying to render all of them at once (I'm at over 100 - it took serious time to load it all even with the lowsrc images)
• Android add-to-homepage progressive web app changed from fullscreen to standalone. Fullscreen looked nicer, but wasn't practical on my phone when I needed to get to the notifications bar quickly to switch back-n-forth to google maps.
• Fixed some missing icons that caused add-to-homepage to use generic android "S" icon.
• Improved the icons on the chrome extension
• Radio stations now generate on the fly
• Internet radio now works
• Last browsing type is now remembered
• Back button from top-level exits app no matter how many times you switch browsing types
• Ability to return to the player and current queue if you back-button out of it.
• Fixed issue where using android notification play/pause, or pulling the headphones out, caused infinite loop and flickering of the player between playing and paused
• Chrome 57+ only, uses new MediaSession API to allow notification pulldown to go forward and back; now shows album art instead of subfire icon in that mode.
• Material loading spinner (needs to be better centered, but at least it is there)
• Bug fixes for going back from player to browsing mode
• Landscape mode improved (though PWA installation will be exclusively portrait - there will be a new, separate tablet app in the future for landscape)

Also started work on Chromecast client support and adding a service worker for full PWA compliance...though that will require me to add https hosting to the new site AND will cause problems if you have to connect to a non HTTPS client (or one with a self-signed cert). I'm not convinced it is worth it.

Now that I have infinite-scrolling working I'm gonna start working on the albums query page. Then I'm likely to take a break on this one (it will do 90% of what I need to do in the car) and get back to the TV/Tablet app.

http://subfiresuite.com/m