Penguin Loves Music

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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Hi friends of Coolio!

The long awaited iPeng 1.1 version is currently in beta testing and to make the wait a bit more exciting, here’s a little update on what it will do.

We have received a tremendous amount of suggestions and feature requests during the last months and we really want to thank you all for these. Really! This is what will make iPeng better. Now iPeng 1.1 is probably the single most important update to make these things happen since a lot has changed under the hood which will enable iPeng to be much more flexible and allow for more functionality.

As a little “teaser” I want to give you an outlook on two of the more prominent results of these changes:

iPeng with plugin support

iPeng 1.1 will support plugins that provide menus for the Squeezebox(TM) Controller. This includes basic functionality like Alarms, Random Play etc., additional ones like CD Player and Biography but also really complex plugins like Custom Browse.

So iPeng’s functionality will not grow by one or two features but potentially dozens! Cool, isn’t it?

iPeng goes SqueezeNetwork

The other big change (awaited by lots of you) will be support for SqueezeNetwork. You no longer need a SqueezeCenter server to use iPeng with your Squeezebox.

See some screen shots of both functionalities below.

Now if you want to add your own feature requests to make iPeng even better and probably get that one functionality you’ve really been missing, please file a ticket with our trac ticketing system:

https://trac.penguinlovesmusic.de/trac/ipengnat/newticket

(don’t let yourself turn off by an error message, you have to log in/register and then you can use it)

Have fun!

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iPeng and PenguinLovesMusic.com is growing in features and functions so the poor penguin can’t keep up doing everything on his own.

So he’s looking for help in the following areas:

Webmaster

~10 h a week.

Responsibilities: Maintain PenguinLovesMusic.com’s blog and trac site, answer support requests.

Graphics Artists

per assignment.

As some have noted before, Coolio’s not the greatest Artist on this planet, so he would need help doing in-application artwork and site design.

If you are interested in one of these openings, please contact coolio(at)penguinlovesmusic.com

iPeng 1.0.4 is now released on the App Store as a free upgrade following the somewhat ill-fated 1.0.3 release. Since we did not write an update then, here’s a summary of the new features:

What’s new?

• Music Folder Browsing. You can now browse your folder structure through the respective SqueezeCenter function. (1.0.3)
• Long lists are now sorted in a separate thread. This strongly improves performance during the loading of large libraries. iPeng will now stay reactive and the load time for a 3,000 album library improves from approx. 4 min to approx. 2 min until the cache is fully synchronized. (1.0.3)
• There is now an experimental Wake-On-LAN funtionality that may or may not work. You have to manually set the MAC for this under Settings. (1.0.3 and 1.0.4).

What’s fixed?

• The “The The” bug is fixed (see Known Issues), so you can put your “ignored articles” back in if you used the workaround in 1.0.3. (1.0.4)
• Albums will now fully load and artwork will show up (1.0.4)
• No more crashes due to SqueezeCenter Bug 10242 (empty album records). You might see empty albums now in the list of albums but they should do no harm. (1.0.3 and 1.0.4)
• Artwork scaling in the list should finally work in cases where the server doesn’t scale (e.g. bmp artwork). It’s still strongly discouraged to use embedded .bmp artwork in your files since you will transmit lots and lots of data and fill your iPhone’s flash disk quite a bit. A full scale .bmp Artwork as delivered by iTunes will take around 1 MB, if you’ve got 1,000 albums that makes… (1.0.4)
• Sorting of Album and Artist lists should now be as expected (1.0.3)

We apologize for any inconvenience you may have had with the 1.0.3 version.

Have Fun!

You liked the iPeng skin? Just thought a WebApp is too slow? Well, then we’ve got something for you:

Explore iPeng usability and iPhone speed with the iPeng 1.0 now on the iPhone App Store.

It’s the ultimate remote control software for Logitech® Squeezebox™ players and the SqueezeCenter server. Have full control over the music all over your home with your iPhone or iPod touch.

We told you it would come and we told you it would have limited functionality but Coolio has been an insisting Penguin, so now it does already give you a bit more than originally expected. Here are the highlights:

• Explore your music library at unprecedented ease: Browse your library categories at our wingtips and select one of “play”, “add” or “add next”. And do that on any level that has playable content with the “touch-and-hold” gesture. Available Categories are
  • Albums, Artists, Genres, Playlists, Favorites

• NowPlaying screen with multi-page controls: Let’s you do all player related activities in one place
• Play Internet Radio, Music Services and Podcasts: Everything that can be accessed through SqueezeCenter can be accessed through iPeng. Including Search, Artwork and all the other goodies. With the same playback functionality as for the library (as available for streaming content)

• Manage, simultaneously control and synchronize all your Squeezebox™ players and servers with iPeng’s MultiPlayer control: iPeng’s MultiPlayer control now is the main dashboard to select , manage and control your players. And Servers.
  

• Manage your playlist: Re-order and directly play the Tracks on the current playlist.

• Have full control over your player features: shuffle, repeat, rate songs, love and ban tracks for music services and much more. On the overlay of the artwork screen. Just as you know it from iPeng.

• Full localization through SqueezeCenter: iPeng itself is currently English only, but most menu items and texts are fully localized as of your server setting.

Now on the iPhone App Store for $9.99.

Download and have fun!

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For more information and detailed usage instructions see help.penguinlovesmusic.de
iPeng requires a SqueezeCenter server from version 7.0 on, available for free from Logitech® at www.slimdevices.com and one or more Squeezebox™ or Transporter® or any compatible hard- or software player.
Squeezebox™ is a trademark of Logitech.

iPhone, iPod and iPhone App Store are trademarks of Apple Inc.

iPeng 0.5.3 is a maintenance release.

Originally it was meant to support the new Alarm feature of SC 7.2 but that functionality is not ready yet. Sorry. I need it, too

Here’s what’s new:

• 0.5.3 is zipped under Windows instead of on a Mac. Vista users were experiencing issues with Mac zip-files.
• it comes with support for the XM Radio plugin
• the Podcast plugin is now supported
• there’s a toolbar shortcut icon for Pandora

Oh, and some cool but useless stuff, too:

• 0.5.3 has the smooth main-menu transition of the failed 0.6
• plus some bling-bling on Now Playing
• the MultiPlayer control is now a bit more reduced. It doesn’t show the track title, album and artist anymore. This takes down server and client load a bit and makes the control smaller, fitting more players on a screen. Should anybody miss the text items, please let me know.

Have fun