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.

The release of the Apple Watch in April brought some new chances and challenges for iPeng, too: How could we realize a quickly manageable version of iPeng for the watch making the best use of its UI (which is like no other UI before attuned to the presence of the user), and which would be the most important use cases with iPeng?

Well, the biggest advantage (compared to the iPhone) of this “most personal device Apple has ever designed” certainly lies in its availability and the easy access to information and menu content it provides. Apple Watch has been designed to be worn, thus it offers the chance to simplify daily, frequent actions and interactions that are related to functions users care about the most. On the other hand, it implies a lot of limitations and restrictions (with regards to space, speed etc.), and besides that, the creation of Apps is limited by the capabilities WatchKit offers.

iPeng on Apple Watch: Glance, Main Screen, Current Playlist

So, for the first version of iPeng for iWatch, we decided to concentrate on the following (and in our eyes basic) functions:

• a “NowPlaying Screen” with info about the currently playing title; play-/pause-, skip to next-/previous track- and volume-buttons;
• a current playlist to show and select tracks;
• a context menu with two functions:
  • Choose Player. You can use “Select Player“ or “QuickSwitch“ to continue listening in another room;
  • Switch Players on/off. You can either only switch a single player off or switch off all players (“Leave Home”-function);
• a “Glance”, giving you a quick overview of what’s currently playing and a simplified way to launch the App.

As you will notice, familiar iPeng features have been preserved, like the volume control for synchronized groups for instance: If you control a group of synced players, all players will change the volume, not just one.  The popular QuickSwitch feature, too, will work with the Apple Watch.

We expect that the most frequent use cases will be to quickly start or stop music on a player, go to the next track, or change the volume without having to look for your iPhone. Within your own WiFi -Network, you don’t even need to have your iPhone with you, which makes the whole thing even more interesting (because you can use it in different rooms).

Switch Player Sequence

Please let us know what you’d like to see in iPeng on the watch!

We are going to maintain and further improve the app in the future, at the moment features like a search- and favorites-function are planned, further (possible) features could be:

• ratings, adding tracks to favorites, “love”ing tracks etc.;
• changing shuffle- and repeat-states for the current playlist.

Feel free to tell us your suggestions with regards to preferred use cases and let us know how iPeng works with Apple Watch for you!

As usual: Have fun with iPeng on your Apple Watch!

iPeng ue, the iPeng App for the Logitech UE™ Smart Radio, has now also taken the step to version number 8. This means, it adopts the iOS 7/8 user interface already familiar to iPeng for Squeezebox users as well as some new features.

iOS 7/8 Look-And-Feel

Version 1.x of iPeng ue was still based on the old iOS 6 user interface design. With version 8, the interface scheme now adopts the new UI design in line with the modern iOS versions.
And it  got quite a beautiful redesign, too.

Dark and Bright Color Scheme

By popular demand, iPeng ue now features a dark and a light color scheme – you’ve  got the choice. And by default, it will always select the most appropriate scheme, based on your current lighting conditions.

Redesigned iPad User Interface

iPeng ue’s iPad user interface got a complete redesign. Player- and playlist-related controls have been separated out to different bars at the top and bottom of the screen, there are no “hidden” controls anymore (yet there still are convenience gestures, actually a lot of them!), and the whole screen layout got tidied up.

In landscape mode you can now pin down the current playlist to permanently show it next to the library content, and the content window can be scaled to show even more of the gorgeous views iPeng uses to present your music library and other content.

[Show as slideshow]

Full support of the new iPhone 6/6 Plus form factors

The new NowPlaying screen makes use of the additional space available on the new, larger phones.

And for the current playlist, iPeng ue now shows thumbnails in portrait mode. And finally, on iPhone 6 and 6Plus, there is a new landscape mode NowPlaying screen that shows the current playlist alongside the album cover in a beautiful layout.

Fully Customizable Main Menu

A lot of users have asked to be able to change their main menu structure to have other menu items on their home menu or hide things they don’t need. iPeng ue now allows you to do that through a simple drag-and-drop interface.

New MultiPlayer Control

The MultiPlayer Control, used to select players and music sources and to manage synchronization, has been redesigned to structure it better and to make changes more easy and transparent.

Other New Features

Other new features include the capability to edit stored playlists, an improved sharing functionality and a direct swipe-to-delete playlist editing.

It’s a Free Update

And the best news: It’s a free update for existing users of iPeng ue. Unlike iPeng 8 for the Squeezebox, this is not a new App but an update of the existing one. iPeng ue has seen much fewer updates than iPeng Classic since it was initially released, and it has also always been a universal App for iPhone and iPad, so we chose to make it just an update.

The restriction that this version only works on iOS 7 and newer still applies, though – users of devices with older iOS versions (since iOS 5) can still download the old iPeng ue through the App Store.

Have fun!

As springtime approaches, iPeng comes up with its first bigger update in 2015, bringing you some brilliant and fresh functionality for your music control.

The first novelty we would like to introduce to you today is Quick Switch, a functionality that allows to switch your players without interrupting your music with only one swiping gesture. Forget about manually syncing your players, saving playlists or re-starting your album and all the other inconveniences you had to take to take your music from one player to the other before. Now iPeng does it for you.

Further improvements concern the management of favorites and stored playlists. Many of you have asked us for a capability to edit these lists, so iPeng 8.1 comes with a functionality that allows you to re-arrange, rename and delete them.

Last but not least, iPeng 8 now fully supports VoiceOver on both iPad and iPhone, an important improvement for visually impaired users.

Welcome to Quick Switch!

I guess you know the situation: You got 30 minutes in the morning for breakfast (i.e. a black coffee), a shower and a makeup (or if you are a guy: a shower and a shave), and to get dressed, grab your things and leave the house, but you really want to start your day in the right way and continue listening to that brilliant Alabama Shakes album you found on Spotify yesterday. So while you’re heading for the bathroom with your coffee cup in one hand and a towel in the other, you wonder if there is an easy and quick way to switch your music from your kitchen player to the bathroom player and you mean a REALLY quick and convenient way. So add an iPhone or an iPad and iPeng 8 to the scene and there you go: Quick Switch is the most simple, quick and modern way to switch playback from one player to another one, for example if you move between rooms.

And that’s how it works:

– swipe right on the player that should take over from the current player;

– the new player will take over playback right where you are, so it’s a continuous experience;

– the old player will be turned off.

It’s as easy as that. Your teenager’s One Direction choreography can be relocated from the living room into her room (where you secretly think it belongs) without any interruption – the best thing being that the living room player will be silent immediately.

iPeng Adds Management for Favorites and Stored Playlists

Many of you have asked us for a capability to edit and rearrange favorites (such as radio stations, albums or single tracks) and stored playlists with iPeng. Until now, it was only possible to delete items in the context menu and playlists could be rearranged through the current playlist only (which was a little complicated and time-consuming) while favorites couldn’t be rearranged at all.

With iPeng 8.1, you can now rearrange, delete and rename items in your favorites list, and you can even arrange your favorites in subfolders. Playlist items, too, can be deleted or renamed directly in the list and single tracks can be rearranged.

And that’s how it works:

Enable Edit Mode

For editing both favorites and playlists, you first have to press the “Edit” button on the top right of the list. Playlists/favorites lists are now set to edit mode.

Favorites

Rearrange Favorites

To rearrange your favorites list, pick up an item by holding it briefly and then move it to the destined place in the list with a drag and drop gesture.

With this gesture, you can simply rearrange items or you can move items into folders (by dropping them onto a folder).

The favorites list also gets a “New Folder” button to create new subfolders.

To remove an item from a subfolder, hold the item to reveal the higher level (enclosing) folder on top of the list. Drop the item onto that folder item to move it back up to the higher level folder.

Delete or Rename Items in Favorites

When in edit mode, swipe to the left on an item to reveal two additional buttons for it:

“Delete” will allow you to delete the item,

“Rename” will allow you to change the item’s name.

With a longer swiping gesture (swipe through) you can also directly delete an item.

Playlists

Delete or Rename Playlists

Deleting/renaming playlists or tracks within a playlist works like in favorites:

When in edit mode, swipe to the left to reveal two additional buttons for an item:

“Delete” will allow you to delete the item,

“Rename” will allow you to change the playlist’s name (playlists only, not for tracks).

With a longer swiping gesture (swipe through) you can also directly delete an item.

Rearrange Tracks

Please note that playlists are always shown in an alphabetic order, so they can’t be rearranged! But with iPeng 8 it is now possible to rearrange tracks in playlists, which works as in favorites:

Again, pick up an item by holding it briefly and then move it to the destined place in the list with a drag and drop gesture.

PlaylistManager

Pro-Tip: And if you work with playlists a lot, you might also be interested in the PlaylistManager plugin which gives you a convenient way to add new tracks directly to a stored playlist: http://www.hergest.demon.co.uk/Music/slim/PlaylistManPlugin.htm

VoiceOver

And last but not least: iPeng 8 now finally fully supports VoiceOver on both iPhone and iPad. VoiceOver, Apple’s accessibility feature to allow blind users to make use of iOS Apps, has been fully supported on iPeng Classic and on iPhone/iPod for iPeng 8. With iPeng 8.1 it will now work on iPad, too. This includes the new favorites and playlist editing features. To make best use of it, you should have at least iOS 8 running on your device.

We hope to be able to help blind Squeezebox users to make better use of their music system. Please let us know if you have any feedback on how it works.

Have fun with iPeng 8!