Penguin Loves Music

Dear Friends!

iPeng 1.2.1 has been out for a while now but the User’s manual was not completely up to speed with this release.

Now, this has changed. I’m happy to announce that the User’s Manual is now fully up to date with regards to iPeng 1.2.1. While completing the 1.2.1 version, we added some more detail and hopefully the readability has improved as well.

Also, the new User’s Manual is now available for download in PDF format.

Like before, it’s designed as an online manual, supports readability on iPhone/iPod touch through an iPhone skin and can be reached using the links in the App under “Help”.

You can find the User’s manual at

help.penguinlovesmusic.de

Even if you are an experienced iPeng user, have a look and see whether you’ll discover some features you didn’t know about, yet.

Have fun!

Today, iPeng 1.2.1 got released on the App Store.

iPeng 1.2.1 is a maintenance release which primarily improves the compatibility with Squeezebox Server 7.4 and fixes some errors but it does come with a few improvements as well.

Improvements include:

• Better handling of context menus in SBS 7.4, especially including the “Add to favorites” and “Remove from favorites” menus available on the Squeezebox Controller to streaming service context menus.
• Better detection of „hold“ gesture avoids accidental triggering of actions;
• iPeng reconnects to the server by server name; this improves automatic reconnection in DHCP managed networks, you no longer need the “Forget Last Server” Option
• Status icons for Alarms and Sleep plus a lot of additional icons for plugins;
• Support for Slide Show Artwork (e.g. in the Flickr app);
• Sorting of search results, Albums returned by “Search” now are sorted as defined in iPeng’s settings plus additional information for the albums will be shown;
• If “Play Single Tracks” option is set in settings, the “Play Shuffled” item in Playlists and Albums will be replaced by “Play All” since “Play All” is not redundant in this context.

Learn more about the major 1.2 release.

See the full list of bugfixes in 1.2.1:

https://trac.penguinlovesmusic.de/trac/ipengnat/query?status=closed&milestone=Release+1.2.1

Have fun with iPeng 1.2.1!

Hi folks,

You may have recognized that iPeng has got a new logo. It’s rather reputable and “chique”, I think, and I´m being replaced by a model. That´s fine with me, it gives me more time to do what I like: Care for iPeng and, well,… I’ve just returned from a trip to Scotland where I have examined the local fishing-grounds. Yum!!! View the pictures from my trip.

Best

Coolio

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I’m happy to announce the availability on the App Store of iPeng 1.2.

iPeng 1.2 is the third major release of iPeng and like 1.1 it will bring you major changes that will make iPeng an even better Music Remote.

Optimized for Squeezebox™ Server 7.4

To begin with, iPeng 1.2 is a complementary release for Squeezebox Server 7.4 and MySqueezebox.com. It fully supports these server releases and in many places also uses similar UI concepts.

In short: Here’s what’s new:

• New Look and Icon
• New User Interface handling ambiguous functionality through context menus instead of modes.
• New MultiPlayer control page that allows for easier player management (syncing, moving between sources,…)
• Group control for synced players.
• Player context menu bundling all player features, reachable through the MultiPlayer control
• Context menus for the current track and tracks in the current playlist.
• Improved management of current playlist including option to save it.
• Quick Tutorials explain the operation of iPeng.
• Many, many details.

New User Interface and Look.

The first thing you’ll notice is changed colors.But believe me, it’s not about colors.

iPeng now has a stringent UI concept that tries to do away with the confusion around SqueezePlay menus and different play modes. iPeng’s new interface logic goes as follows:

• Every item that has more than one action attached to it does have a Context Menu
• You reach the Context Menu through a “hold” gesture (hold an item for approx. 1s). This will work almost everywhere (as long as there is something to be displayed): menus, library items, NowPlaying cover, playlist item, current player, you name it.
• Simply tapping an item will trigger the default action, most of the time this means: descend to a lower menu.
• Clicking an Album Cover (in a menu) will immediately play that album (there are one or two exceptions to this in places where it doesn’t make sense to play the album).

There is one exception: When viewing an Album or Playlist (that is: anything containing only tracks) there is still the old “mode” scheme. This is to allow you faster access to tracks for playing whole albums or building playlists; for many users these are the things they usually do with iPeng:

• There are the tree modes in the navigation bar that determine what happens when you tap a track
• play plays the whole album from that track
• add adds the track to the end of the playlist
• play-next inserts the track after the current one in the playlist.
• hold will, as always, bring up a context menu.

New MultiPlayer Control

First of all: Yes, it does scroll . Apart from that, the whole thing has been completely redesigned.

• Synced players are now grouped in sync groups that are distinguishable by the currently playing track and play state. Below this there are the individual players and you can set individual volume and power state of each player.

• The MultiPlayer control has an edit mode in which you can move players between sync groups and also music sources. This can be done through drag’n'drop or by selecting several players and clicking a command button.

Group Control

If you select a player from a sync group, the main volume and power controls no longer act on the individual player, but on the whole group. Note: this is different from the “Sync Power” and “Sync Volume” settings in Squeezebox Server since you still have individual control over each player:

• The main volume slider will show the average volume of the sync group. Moving the slider will change the volume on all players synchronously. You can change the relative volume between players using the controls on the MultiPlayer control.
• The main power button will switch power on all players. You can still change the power state of individual players using the MultiPlayer control.

Player Context Menu

By clicking the accessory button on the current player in the MultiPlayer control or by holding the player you get to a player context menu. This menu will bundle all player specific settings and features such as

• Alarms
• Sleep
• Player name
• some plugins that act on players
• Digital Inputs (Transporter only).

NowPlaying Context Menus

The cover art on NowPlaying and the tracks in the current playlist now have a TrackInfo context menu that allows you to access features like

• Add to favorites
• Browse by album/artist etc.
• Access similar music through Apps
• Get more Information about the track

Current Playlist

• Deleting tracks from the current playlist has been changed to a batch delete (just try it, you will understand it).

• Also, the current playlist can now be saved.

Quick Tutorials

In several places in iPeng, features you encounter for the first time will be explained by a short, animated tutorial.

And many more details…

• Keep Connection now really works (at least for 30min)
• WiFi will no longer be shut down as long as the App is in the foreground.
• Apps can be included in the main menu.
• there is more…

As usual: Have fun with iPeng

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Since the iPeng App came out last November it turned out to be much more popular than the free iPeng plugin, so there wasn’t a lot of news here.

Now we promised to keep it supported yet with iPhone 3.0 it stopped working. Obviously due to a bug done by somebody else, but what help is that…

Now here’s a small maintenance release (iPeng 0.5.4) which will work around this and make the plugin work with iPhone 3.0.

Yet, while this fixes the Safari crash on NowPlaying there are still a few things that won’t work in 3.0 due to changes made to the platform:

• Playlist reordering. The iPeng scheme for doing this was to “hold” an item to move it around. Now “hold” in Safari now activates cut&paste so this feature obviously doesn’t work anymore
• MultiPlayer Control. This feature requires dynamically added CSS styles which are no longer available due to the pre-compiling nature of Safari in 3.0.

I hope you still find it useful and apologize for the limited support – but there are just so much more users of the native iPeng App that this one takes precedence.

Have fun!

iPeng 0.5.4 – Compatibility Release for iPhone 3.0

How About Android? Volunteers Out There?

One thing that came as a surprise to me today is that iPeng 0.5.4 is obviously almost compatible with Android Phones. Transforms and transitions work and the layout almost fits.

I don’t have the time to work myself into the depths of the browser used there (a chrome variety?) so does anybody else feel like it?

Like he did last year, little Coolio is visiting Apple’s developer conference WWDC to learn about all the new and cool things he’ll be able to do with an iPhone or an iPod touch in the future.

Last year’s visit finally brought us the iPeng App, let’s see what this year’s results in…

Let’s just hope that someday they design badges that fit little penguins

iPeng 1.1.2 is now available on the App Store.

It’s a bugfix release that fixes a crash and an update issue on the Current Playlist.

The iPeng 1.1.1 update is now available on the AppStore.

1.1.1 is mainly a service release targeted at fixing some issues with wakeup from standby and crashes upon rearranging/deleting tracks from the current playlist.

It does have two additional features, though:

• IRBlaster volume control: If you set volume control commands for IRBlaster for a player, iPeng’s volume slider for that player will be replaced by “up/down” buttons that send volume up/down commands through IRBlaster. These commands will repeat at a rate of 5 commands/s

NOTE: If you disable IRBlaster, please also remove the volume commands for the player since iPeng detects IRBlaster using these settings and will otherwise still show the IRBlaster interface instead of the slider.

• Albums and Playlists in Music Services like Rhapsody or Napster will now be shown and act like albums and playlists do in the local library.

This means: You don’t need the “touch-and-hold” gesture anymore to play tracks and also album/playlist playing behavior and look is now consistent with the local library menus.

Folks, this may be a bit off topic for iPeng, but since it’s experience I gathered developing this it might just be of interest for you as well. Take it as a read while waiting for an update to come out

There are quite a few bad tempered comments on Apple’s review process for the App Store and I agree I did have my share of getting angry, too. But I whenever I calm down a bit I tend to see it not that bad and – most importantly – I believe I somewhat understand what’s happening. Maybe this is of value for others, too. So this blog entry is mainly for those who want to develop for the App Store.

I tried to look at this from Apple’s perspective to understand it a bit more and that offered some eye-openers.

What I’ve Seen

Just some sampled facts upfront:

• I got some rejections due to the fact that the tester obviously did not understand the product or the test environment, even though some of these aspects were written out clearly in the product description. The most prominent case being a rejection due to “Your App doesn’t have the features given in the product description: no tune can be heard on iPhone”. Well, yes. Indeed. It’s a remote control application, it’s not supposed to play tunes. Sentence #1 of the product description says so.
• The sooner iPeng got reviewed, the better the success rate. Generally, my experiences with the duration of the review process are much, much better than what you read on the internet. I never waited for a review for more than 7 days! The longest lag I had was when I got a rejection but the actual state was not changed from “in review” to “rejected”. For rejections that came in early (the quickest one I did get was after only one day) were generally more qualified and sometimes even contained detailed suggestions on how to fix things.
• Yes, they DO even work on weekends!
• I did have rejections before on grounds that I did not accept as valid. I generally felt that answering to these aspects in the submission comments did help, obviously my comment were heard.
• I only had one release (the ill-fated 1.0.3) that came through on the first try.
• I did only get very few answers to e-mails I sent. I do believe they got read and I do believe the information I gave was used in the review process but usually I didn’t get an answer.

How Should You Sumbit?

Now what do I conclude from that? And how can this be of help for you to get to the App Store?

1. Time matters. There are obviously times when there are more submissions and times when there are less. It looks like Apple tries to make sure you don’t have to wait for more than a week. This can of course put a lot of pressure on the testers in busy times and I suspect that under these circumstances in case of doubt they don’t try to find out what’s wrong but put that burden on you and reject. Especially if it’s the first try for a release.
2. Explanations matter. Apple must have more than one tester. Don’t expect the one that gets your submission to know your App. I have made very good experience with giving details on how to expect the App to behave in the submission comments. The same is true for answers to the reasons for rejection. Explain why your App is just behaving fine.
3. Explanations matter. We had that? OK, just again because it’s so important. Don’t even expect full attention for your App, I don’t know if that’s the case but I believe Apps get tested in parallel. Don’t expect the product description to be remembered in full.
4. Calm down. This is the most difficult (at least for me) but also the most important part of the story. A rejection is not the end of the world, you can resubmit. Do a new build. If you can, fix what they objected to even if you don’t see it the same way (who wants to argue), write a nice and well-tempered e-mail in response to the rejection and – most important! – follow steps 2 and 3.

“Please, Apple, add a feedback loop!”

Now, that doesn’t mean the process is perfect. And just in case somebody from Apple ever reads this (and hasn’t become completely angry on me writing this), here’s what I’m missing from the process: A feedback loop. It would just be sooo helpful (and if just for peace of mind) to be able to answer to feedback. And not always have to resubmit and wait another week. Some process that let’s you answer to the very tester who did the first review and make him or her have another look at it with your feedback in mind. Probably even before rejecting.

Yours sincerely

I’m happy to announce the availability of iPeng 1.1, the second “major” release of iPeng, your ultimate Squeezebox™ remote.

While the 1.0.x releases were mainly focusing on bug fixes and minor enhancements, iPeng 1.1 will bring some more fundamental changes:

iPeng goes SqueezeNetwork

Long awaited by those of you who don’t operate their own server or don’t want to run it 24/7, iPeng now also offers access to SqueezeNetwork. Just “swipe right” on the “NowPlaying” home screen and you will find it on the MultiPlayer Control along with any servers you might have. There is also a new button for each player that will connect or disconnect that player from SqueezeNetwork.

What does SqueezeNetwork offer with iPeng?

iPeng will support the full functionality of SqueezeNetwork, that is: Play internet radio, podcasts and music services, manage your favorites, and control your players. You will also be able to set alarms and this brings us to the second big change in iPeng 1.1…

Plugin Support

iPeng 1.1 offers support for the SqueezePlay menu system which allows it to support a lot of functionality as it would show up on a Squeezebox™ Controller or a SqueezePlay software player.

This open up iPeng to a lot of internal SqueezeCenter features that were not yet supported: Alarms, Sleep, Browse by Years, Random Mix, TrackInfo Details,… almost everything offered by SqueezeCenter will now be controllable on iPeng.

Yet it’s not limited to that, because using this interface, iPeng also has access to 3rd party plugins, so now you can define your own library queries using CustomBrowse, browse by statistics using TrackStat, get background information using Biography or Album Review, build custom mixes using MusicIP, it’s a whole world…

Performance Improvements

“Oh my, iPeng was such a nice app, now with all these new features it’s growing fat and slow…”

No!

It doesn’t, the opposite is true. iPeng’s internals have been completely re-done and use a faster protocol now but also, thanks to great support from Logitech we have been able to make iPeng cooperate better with recent versions of SqueezeCenter so if you use SC 7.3.2 or newer, iPeng will offer some notable performance improvements:

• Much faster loading of large databases. Our benchmark in the beta phase was for remote(!) access to a huge database with 247.000 tracks and 24.000 albums, iPeng was synchronizing this database in under 6 minutes! A small database with < 2.000 albums should load well below one minute. Note: This may also depend on your server; iPeng can not make up for slow server performance.

• iPeng now supports SqueezeCenter’s list sorting. This is not only a speed improvement but it also means that ALBUMSORT and ARTISTSORT tags or custom sort orders will be respected by iPeng. Your database will now show up in iPeng as it would in SqueezeCenter.
• New option to keep server connection open. This will allow you to get immediate access to your server once your iPhone comes out of standby without having to establish a server connection first. Note: this will use more power and can eventually drain your battery.

Along with these big changes, there’s a lot of small improvements that make the iPeng experience more feature rich and streamlined. Just upgrade or get your iPeng now on the App Store and…

Have Fun!

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