Today we present you an article that might strike some of you as a bit unusual here because it’s mostly not about software but about a cool piece of hardware.

It’s a Squeezebox built from a Tivoli Audio alarm speaker, and for the impatient ones among you, here are the key features and a picture:

• Tivoli Speaker and case using the original speaker and 3W output;
• WiFi;
• runs on battery for a whole day (more than 12h);
• rotary and push controller for volume and play/pause;
• separate alarm clock;
• fully Squeezebox compatible player using a Raspberry Pi zero and SqueezeLite;
• very simple and power-efficient 5V design.

And since Coolio and I do software in the first place, the whole project has its own software as well, in this case our open-sourced solution to power the volume and play/pause control. It’s quite cool, too :), you can find it on GitHub at https://github.com/coolio107/SqueezeButtonPi-Daemon

If you want to read the full story, you can find it here:

The Tivoli Squeezebox Radio

Apple just released iOS 10, and your favorite penguin hasn’t been lazy but made iPeng ready for the new operating system.

Unfortunately, iOS 10’s most prominent feature – Siri voice control support for apps – is not available for music apps yet. But since under iOS 10 widgets have become much more powerful, our iPeng 9.2 update includes some decisive improvements considering their usability.

What Has Changed?

First of all widgets have a new look in iOS 10, and being able to switch between a large and a small version of a widget – a feature iPeng’s widget has offered from the beginning – has now become a system feature. Widgets can also take up a bit more space on the screen, allowing us to improve their legibility.

But iOS 10 also makes widgets available in a lot more places and situations: in the search screen, for instance, and as a quick action on your home screen (if you force-touch the icon; iPhone 6s and newer only).

In both cases, the “compact” widget style is being used by default, so besides adapting the design, we decided to make the most important commands – play/pause, skip and volume – available directly from the compact window as well. This way you no longer need to start the app to start or stop playback, just do it right from the app’s icon.

Dynamic Type

Under iOS 10 the widget now also supports Dynamic Type, an iOS feature that lets you define the text size on your device. This helps to further improve the accessibility of the app.

Deep Integration with Apple’s Remote Control Commands

As another novelty iPeng now supports Apple’s remote control commands. If iPeng has been the last audio app you have used, you will be able to control it through the iOS control center (or remote control accessories such as docks).

Now generally this has been possible with iPeng for a long time, but with iOS 10 the support of the remote control interface has become much more powerful and reliable: It will now even launch iPeng’s playback feature if it has been stopped in the background, so if you just want to continue playing, here’s another case where you don’t even have to open the app at all.

Have fun!

It’s been a while since the last iPeng update, but today we are back with a new feature requested by many users for a while: a so called “Today Widget”, an extension that allows you to place iPeng in the Notification Center on your lock screen.

The Notification Center is the view you can open anywhere on your iPhone or iPad by dragging your finger down from the top of the screen. It has “Notifications” and “Widgets” and the latter are where you can place iPeng. If you need more information on how to configure Widgets in iOS, you might find it here: http://appadvice.com/appnn/2014/09/how-to-setup-new-notification-center-widgets-in-ios-8

What does it do?

The main idea behind the widget is to let you quickly control your players without having to unlock the screen of your iOS device, so the main focus is on displaying information about the current track and giving you player controls.

You can switch between two sizes for the widget: a compact form that only shows information for the current track,

and a bigger format giving you controls for play/pause, volume and skipping between tracks and within a track (+/- 30s).

You can also change the current player: Tapping the player name will give you a list of all your players, and if you switch to another one, your main iPeng will follow that selection, too.

Switching to the main App

If you need other features, you can quickly launch the full iPeng app by tapping the title information in the widget.

There are also two other cases in which the widget takes you directly to the main App:

• whenever you have too many players to show the full list directly in the widget (a widget can’t show more than a screenful of information) or
• if you try to control iPeng’s own player (to stream to your iOS device) while the player is not running. In this case the main iPeng App needs to launch to start the player. While it’s playing, the widget will (of course) directly control it like any other player.

A note on using the widget with MySqueezebox.com

To use the widget with MySqueezebox.com, iPeng needs to store your login credentials for the service, something it did not do in the past.

To allow for this, you will have to re-login into MySqueezebox.com, using the “i”-Button for the Music Source, and follow the instructions:

So, this is iPeng’s new Today Widget. Enjoy even faster control of your music and have fun!

It has taken a bit longer than expected with App Store reviews and all that, but now iPeng 9, the iOS 9-release of iPeng, is finally available as a free update from iPeng 8/7.

As usual accompanying major iOS releases, iPeng incorporates new platform capabilities and features and prepares to support new hardware.

However, this years new operating system features are so numerous (and the number of supported platforms, too, now that there is also the Apple Watch, and Apple TV and iPad Pro are just around the corner) that we could not implement all new features in one release, so iPeng 9.0 is just the first of several updates that will add new capabilities to iPeng during the coming months.

So what’s new in iPeng 9?

Last year, with iPeng 8, support for the new form factors for iPhone was introduced, which meant most of the changes primarily affected the iPhone.

This year, it’s the iPad that has seen most of the improvements for now, but there will probably be further improvements in later versions for the iPhone, too.

Slide Over and Split View

iOS 9 brings new multitasking capabilities to the iPad, and we think they are especially important for a remote control App like iPeng.

Slide Over

Slide Over – available from iPad Air or iPad mini 2 on – allows you to quickly bring in a second App with a swipe from the right edge of the screen without leaving the App you are in. This can come in really handy for example if you are reading something and you just quickly want to change volume or skip a track. Just swipe from the right edge and select iPeng to be shown in the Slide Over view, make your changes and quickly return to the previous App.

Split View

Split View – available on iPeng mini 4 and iPad Air 2 – goes one step further and allows you to show and use two Apps side-by-side, both occupying a smaller screen space. This way you can permanently have iPeng available next to another App.

iPeng 9 in Split View

Using the new view modes

In both these new modes, iPeng no longer “owns” the whole screen but has to limit itself to a smaller window. This means, iPeng’s normal layout showing the main menu and the library content side-by-side no longer works, especially in the very narrow Slide Over view.

The solution iPeng uses for this is to slide the content view over the main menu to allow it to use the whole window. You can slide it in and out the same way you can rearrange the views in full-screen mode, too, just that here you will hide the main menu completely when you move the content view to the left.

In addition to this, in this “compact” view, the button arrangement changes on both the main and the NowPlaying screen to still be able to make all functions accessible with less width available.

Activation

One note on swipe gestures: Swiping from the right screen edge used to be the gesture to bring in the current playlist in iPeng for iPad. Now this is also being used to bring in a Slide Over view. The solution is that the Slide Over gesture will work in the (vertical) center of the screen while you can bring in the playlist by using the same gesture near the top or bottom of the screen.

iPad Pro

The new flexibility with regards to screen sizes becomes especially apparent on Apple’s upcoming next iPad model: the iPad Pro. On the iPad Pro, two Apps can run side-by-side in landscape mode and have almost the same size as on smaller iPad models in portrait mode. Or, if you run iPeng in full screen, you have even more space to show your library content – actually so much space that on the iPad Pro iPeng will allow you to permanently show the current playlist (“pin” it to the main screen), not only in landscape but also in portrait orientation.

iPeng uses a new font

iPeng 9 also introduces a new font to iPeng: Fira Sans. It gives iPeng a more distinguished look compared to the system font, but it also serves a practical purpose:

With iOS 9 Apple switches to a new system font called “San Francisco”. San Francisco was designed to offer better legibility at small point sizes (short text height), but it does so at the expense of greater width, at least for small sizes.

This is great if you want to display blocks of text on the screen, like for a reader or browser App, because you can get more lines on the screen and still have a well legible text, the few characters less you can show per row are typically less important.

iPeng, however, often shows single lines of text that are width-limited while the height of a row became less important in the light of devices getting bigger. For this reason, we wanted a font that is narrower but taller, trading height for width, and we wanted it to be at least as legible as Apple’s font.

What we found as a solution was Fira Sans, the font developed by Carrois and Edenspiekermann for the Mozilla Foundation.

While technically a sans-serif font, Fira Sans has some visual guides that improve legibility for narrow text and has a relatively small width, allowing us to increase the point size of the font while still displaying the same number of characters in a row.

This way, iPeng achieves improved legibility without sacrificing content.

Watch out for more news in iPeng

These are the major changes for now, but iOS 9, watchOS 2 and upcoming tvOS have much more to offer, so watch out for more new features and iPeng variants in the next months…

Have fun with iPeng!

A device like the Apple Watch brings new challenges for the app design, especially considering the limitations Apple’s current WatchKit has. Communication with the watch is not very fast and consumes a lot of battery power and since apps run on the iPhone, not the watch, every piece of information needs to go back and forth. So uploading long lists and the like or permanent remote communication right now don’t look like a good idea.

Also, there is a fixed and small set of user interface elements one can use on the Watch. This is a pity, particularly when it comes to the volume buttons. Ideally, one would want to use the crown to change volume, but currently that’s not possible.

So browsing through long lists of thousands of albums or the like will probably not make sense (Apple’s own apps are all quite limited in that respect), Apple’s general guideline is to only implement tasks that don’t take longer than 10s since after that the arm will quickly start to tire.

iPeng tries to find the sweet spot in between these limitations with its current design, here are a few design features:

Glance as Entry Point

Navigating the honeycomb home screen is complicated and takes time. The easier way to launch an app is through a glance. iPeng’s glance shows you a “NowPlaying” screen, tapping it takes you to the app.

Currently, WatchKit glances can’t contain any active elements, so there are no buttons or other controls even though we would love to be able to have them.

Scrolling Track Titles with Custom Font

Apple’s system font on the watch is optimized for legibility at small font sizes. You can get a maximum number of (legible) rows on the display this way, but it’s not the optimum solution if – like in iPeng’s case – all you want to display are one or two rows of track title and that quickly exceeds the width of the display. So iPeng uses a different font with a smaller run width and uses a bigger character size instead.

To be able to show longer titles, the title label scrolls.

Page-Based Layout

iPeng uses a page-based layout, not a hierarchical menu structure. This is familiar from the layout of the “NowPlaying” screen on iPhone, but on the Apple Watch it’s actually a more important decision. Page-based apps cannot have a hierarchical menu like the main menu on iPhone, so that option is no longer available for additional functionality (like search). But a hierarchical structure would have meant that it takes longer to get to the “NowPlaying” screen – not a good idea for a functionality you are probably going to use 90% of the time.

iPeng places the most important features right in front even if it means less often used features might be more difficult to access.

Speed

iPeng will sometimes trade perfect information for speed of access. On iPhone, iPeng will keep a permanent connection to the server, allowing iPeng to track a lot of states and always be aware of what’s going on with your Squeezeboxes. But establishing this connection takes seven seconds on average. Add a few seconds for the app launch and you end up with a time well in excess of the overall time you wanted to interact at all. So iPeng on the watch will always try to use the quickest way to access information or execute a command. Sometimes this means some information is limited or updates later (e.g. artwork), but at the same time it means it’s probably the fastest remote control app you’ve got around.

The Future

The Apple Watch is a very new product, we will see how it evolves in the future and what kind of usage schemes evolve, but right now I believe iPeng is giving you a really good UI for the quick control of your players on your wrist.

Apple also already announced watchOS 2.0 for this fall and it brings some changes, the most important of which is that Apps will actually run on the Watch, not the iPhone. This will probably help with performance for some features but might even hurt for others (everything requiring direct communication with the parent App on the iPhone will actually take longer to execute). Overall, I would not expect the biggest impact to be through faster loading times and access to the crown.