OK, it’s been a while since my last update and it hasn’t happened too much.

Reason is simple: Apple ran out of these cool 36-hour iDays so Coolio and I had to live along with that old, analog 24h version 🙁

Along comes the big issue that MobileSafari for the time being tuned out too slow and too buggy to handle all the cool stuff I tried to include in the 0.6 skin/plugin version, so I had to drop that one 🙁

OK, back to native.

Recently I DID finally find a bit of time to continue working on it and now it’s progressing a bit.

It still doesn’t do too much (just a menu placeholder and a NowPlaying screen) but there’s quite a bit of under-the-hood logic already in place so I actually see it progressing every day right now.

Given past experiences and uncertainty of supply for iDays I will NOT make any predictions on WHEN this is gonna come but I’ll keep you updated and given the current pace I think about a month more could get me something release-worthy.

Coolio and I don’t get along without teasers, so here’s a screenshot of NowPlaying as it looks today. It may not be a lot, but at least I can say that everything you see there works already…

So now it’s up to you: spot the differences 🙂

When we released the new Playback feature the first question was “How long will the battery last”. Streamin application (not only) on the iPhone are notorious for their power consumption. And for the iPeng playback to work correctly, Auto-Lock has to be off, so the screen will always be powered on. So is it worthwhile?

To find an answer to that question I did some endurance testing today and it took me hours – which is what I had hoped it would 😉

It looks like it pays off, that Apple does not provide for “real” streaming, but only for file playback – the tracks get transferred to the Phone or Touch in a few seconds and then there’s no more communication needed.

So here’s the result:

Test setup:

• iPod touch (8GB) with FW 2.0 and iPeng 0.5.2
• Auto-Lock switched to “off”, so the screen will stay on and the Touch will play continuously
• Volume set to 50% (so this is more a “realistic scenario” as an “how long can it get if you max it out”
• Brightness:50% and Auto “ON”
• Test-Playlist: Mixed music tracks
• Test process: Browse to playlist. Load playlist. Browse to Playback plugin. Start playback. Let it run.

Playback time: 5h 12min!

Now I feel that’s a good result. I had expected something like four hours, so more than five is quite good. And much better than the two hours of browsing I get on the device.

So: Happy listening!

Today we’ve got the first beta of a tool Coolio has been waiting for from the very beginning. It was his (and my) Christmas wish but now it came true in summer: “Stream” your library to iPhone/iTouch!

OK, it’s still early beta and has some “experimental” appeal, but it works.

What does it do? Well, you can’t stream mp3 streams to iPhone. Still not. But iPhone can play mp3s  on your server. So what iPeng does: it has a new NowPlaying plugin, called “iPeng Local Playback” that will give you your actual playlist as a set of mp3 files (no, you don’t see that, it’s just a playlist) and you can click them to play.

QuickTime will open and playback the track and all that follow.

Sounds cool? Is cool.

However, it’s still experimental, so it comes with some issues, which hopefully will be sorted out soon, but definitely for the native app:

• You have to turn off the screensaver. That’s probably the biggest one. MobileSafari switches off event handling when the screen saver kicks in. The result of this is: the playlist will not advance after the currently playing track. A workaround is to unlock the screen saver manually after each track (iPeng will automatically advance the track then) but this is not fun. 🙁 We do have a good idea how to fix it, but it’s work. iPhone simply does not support this better right now.
• The skip buttons in QuickTime don’t work but end the playback.
• mp3 and AAC only. No transcoding on the server (yet). It’s being worked on…
• You still need a player connected to the server. SqueezeCenter can only manage a playlist for a player, so you need one. Can be a computer (through the mp3-stream) or SoftSqueeze (which comes with SqueezeCenter), but it’s needed. I filed an enhancement request so hopefully this will also be sorted out soon.
• The Quicktime Control acts somewhat erratically on the screen. It will sometimes overlay the top menu bar. This seems to be an Apple bug. Don’t know, if they’ll fix it. It doesn’t look good, but it does not kill any functionality, just swipe away the Playback page and it will go away, too.

Why so late? Logitech had to do an enhancement to the SqueezeCenter server. They did this for the latest beta now, so here we are.

So how does it work?

1. Download and install the latest beta of SqueezeCenter 7.1 (build 21902 or later)
2. Download the iPeng 0.5.2 file from the Downloads page
3. Install it. If you’ve got iPeng 0.5.1 (only that one) installed, you can install it over the old version and use it right away, no need to restart the server. To update from older version see Installation.

Have fun!

So, after a busy weekend doing some final fixes here’s the first version of iPeng for iPhone 2.0 / 3G (and iTouch 2.0, of course).

It finally will be a completely rewritten plugin, but for now, only some of the new stuff is ready, but it is already fully compatible to iPhone 2.0.

What’s new?

All of the current changes are on the NowPlaying screen (where they were needed most):

Smooth Scrolling:

• The different pages on the NowPlaying screen now can be scrolled in and out like the Pages of the Springboard.
• You don’t need to do “two finger scrolling” to move around content pages or the playlist. We’ve all waited for this, haven’t we

Seamless Volume and “Elased Time” controls

• In former iPeng versions, you could click on the volume bar to select a volume. This was a bit inexact. Now you can drag the volume handle.
• While dragging, the current volume will permanently alter, so you can hear whether it’s what you want
• An extra overlay will show the current volume level, in case you like it VERY exact.
• For “Elapsed Time” this will show the time into the track. But no, no immediate update here, of course, your track stays on until you release the handle

And last but not least: Drag’n’Drop reordering of the Playlist

• No more clicking between tracks to change their order.
• Just touch and hold a track for more than 1.5s and it will be “elevated”. Now you can drag it along the list and drop it into the place where you want it to be.
• COOL!

So. Have fun. Send fish. And wait for more to come 😉

Some news from Coolio after a while.

He recently went to California to visit Apple’s WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) for you. And after getting a few penguin full of fish out of the Pacific ocean (OK, he’s a lazy guy, he let the fishermen get it out of the ocean for him), he attended the conference to see what new is there on the iPhone and iPhone native apps.

What he learned was really cool, even though the weather was rather hot (form him). Native apps on iPhone perform well but also the web interface improved a lot. So Coolio convinced me, to give the web based plugin another try and improve that first. What comes out of this will be available together with Apple’s 2.0 Software on July 11th and it is quite amazing stuff. Looks like this solves a LOT of iPeng’s current performance issues and let’s this really look a lot like a native app while still retaining all the flexibility of a web page.

So look forward to July 11th, and expect a new release with cool improvements. Best of it right ahead: No more “two finger scrolling”

Cheers!