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Media Browser iPad app update


darwindeeds

13676 views

We are very excited to introduce you to the new iPad app that we have been working on for the last few months. We wanted to create an app that goes beyond just basic functionality and also has a great user experience.

 

The central theme that we focused on for this application was speed, speed, speed.

 

Media Caching

All media information is cached using a combination of both disk and memory caches. On startup we prime our memory caches with our disk cached media list information for a given server. This allows lightening fast loading of our media lists across tabs.

 

Scrolling

This makes or breaks the app; we have users with 1000s of movies and scrolling through them should be lighting fast. Jaggedness or choppiness will kill the user experience. Besides caching the media list we also aggressively cache all images into memory mapped files for the fastest retrieval was can possibly achieve. This results in a silky smooth scrolling experience.

 

Navigation

This is a subtle thing that can make for awful experience: opening a page and being stuck at a spinner. When you navigate between pages in our app we try avoid blocking the user. If data is required for a given view we try really hard to show what data we have available and then load the additional data in the background.

blogentry-61-0-28611000-1398738022_thumb.gif

 

Search and Sort

The client has all the metadata that are required to sort or filter you list so we eliminate the need to make server calls and perform them locally. This results in almost instantaneous searching and sorting.

blogentry-61-0-89437300-1398738438_thumb.gif blogentry-61-0-44352600-1398738459_thumb.gif

 

Usability (UI/UX):

Raw performance isn't the only way to create a faster experience. We worked with our designer, developers and testers to find ways we can make typical actions with the app fast. Here are some examples:

 

Shallow Navigation: We want you to get to you media with minimum number of taps. To do this we designed a new "detail" screen for TV Shows. The user used to have to tap on tv shows > series > seasons > episodes > episodes detail before he can play his media. This can become tedious if you have to do it often. So we created a solution where you go from TV Shows > Detail page and everything that you need to access your TV Shows is designed into a single page.

 

blogentry-61-0-58238000-1398738402_thumb.gif blogentry-61-0-10888200-1398739043_thumb.gif

 

Perspective Design: We also wanted the main pages to be in focus all the time -- we have found excessive navigation can become tiring for a user.

Example: You are checking out the movie Star Trek into the Darkness and you wanted to read about Chris Pine and check out what other movies he is in. We don't want to show a detail page, a cast page, related movie page. We wanted to keep you in the movie detail page while you access all the information that you are looking for.

 

blogentry-61-0-70290900-1398738764_thumb.gif

 

Trailers:

 

blogentry-61-0-66952400-1398739583_thumb.gif

 

Chapters:

 

blogentry-61-0-13343600-1398738523_thumb.gif

 

Same design applies to remote as well, the idea is to keep the key item in perspective.

 

blogentry-61-0-33390100-1398738648_thumb.gif

 

Home page is both stylish and functional. Just take a look. (Oh man, simulator and gif don't do just to home design)

 

blogentry-61-0-25783300-1398739005_thumb.gif

 

Solid Core Features:

We know that Media Browser is a very feature rich server. We had to make a decision to either launch sooner or delay launching so we could continue to build out this long tail of features. We have decided to focus on a core set of features we think will be most used and do them as well as we can. We will re-evaluate this set of features after the app has been released for awhile and we collect feedback from our users. Some of the features that won't make it into our release: music playback, ebooks, internationalization, etc.

 

We are very excited about this app and I hope you feel the same way when you get to try this app. We are targeting end of next week (before 5/10/2014) for the App Store submission and it will be available in all countries once we get through the approval process.

 

Our Team:

  • Simucal - Developer
  • Darwindeeds - Developer
  • ErgoProxy - Design Ninja

I also wanted to give a special shout out to our beta testers sfnetwork, cheesegeezer, spaceboy and im85288. They have really helped us iron out a lot of bugs and design issues in our beta.

  • Like 15

30 Comments


Recommended Comments



Ghostm

Posted

@Ghostm I would like to implement a remote feature at some point, I want the remote feature to become more main stream before I start digging into it. We want the first release to be solid so that we can build on top of it. 

 

 

Ok thanks I will wait patiently, just a side note todays server dev i noticed has the remote function working, i was using it when connected to media browser theater, very useful controls. 

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Ergo Proxy

Posted

Glad that there is some excitement building up to this app. Been a pleasure to work with Simucal and Darwindeeds on this. Always helps when everyone is trying to achieve the same goal.

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any news on how the app is progressing through the review process?

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philman84

Posted

Only one feature that I can think of that currently shits me with any mobile client at the moment, particularly in the TV Shows section as thats where I use custom images.

Allow images named 'folder' to be shown in both portrait or landscape on preference. ie "Poster (Portrait)", "Poster (Landscape)"

 

Im not sure if its being considered for this app or not, have not seen a preview that demonstrates this at all.

 

Web Client - Images are made smaller to fit the area.

 

Current Mobile App - Images get cut off.

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