Bookshelf Apps

SongBook 3 update

May 20th, 2010 8

SongBook 3 got rejected last night. I know a lot of developers don’t talk about rejections, or give vague reasons that don’t always seem to add up, but I think it’s a good idea to keep everyone informed. The trouble with talking about App Store rejections is that you need to explain in details the flaws in your code. I really do think that SongBook 3 is a big step up, reliability wise, from SongBook 2, so it’s a bit difficult to admit that the reviewers did find a crash.

There were a couple of issues. Firstly SongBook did not work with MediaLink media server. It appears that MediaLink, which is a PS3 specific media server does not support the browse command, which SongBook requires, so MediaLink is not an option anyway, but SongBook did crash, so that’s a legitimate reason for rejection. An alternative to MediaLink that does work though is a free app called Majestic.

The other issue was to do with PopOvers on the iPad. I wasn’t aware that the button that invokes the PopOver remains active, so in SongBook you could open the PopOver multiple times, one on top of the other. Not a very serious issue, but a bug nonetheless. These App Store reviewers are thorough.

I think I caught another potential rejection reason, so made a fix for that too.?

So a new version has been submitted, in a few days we should know the result of this round of testing.

SongBook 3 in Review

May 13th, 2010 3

The long awaited SongBook 3 release has been completed and submitted to Apple. This release is a huge upgrade and should be a worthwhile update for everyone.

Requirements

Beginning with SongBook 3 you require Linn’s Cara firmware. SongBook 3 will not work with Bute. All DS’s can be upgraded to Cara so there is no reason not to update, and with new features like the Radio support it is well worth it.

Radio

We’ve built in a very complete Radio implementation. Not only can you access the Radio Presets, but you can browse the full RadioTime directory directly on your device and choose a station from anywhere in the world.

We’ve also added Preset management features, you can save the station you are listening to as a preset, and you can delete an existing preset if you no longer want it. These settings are submitted to the RadioTime server for access anywhere you would like.

We’ve licensed the RadioTime directory and are providing this as a free upgrade for existing customers.

iPad

This is our first iPad release. As you’d expect it’s remarkably fast, and the big screen really enhances the browsing experience. Over time will will add more iPad specific features, in this release we provide all the functionality of the iPhone version with a completely new user interface designed specifically for the iPad.

Existing users can move their copy of SongBook to the iPad and get this functionality for free.

It’s faster

We’ve extensively profiled the SongBook code and smoothed out the bottlenecks. Library browsing is faster, startup is faster, waking from sleep is faster, and now that we cache album art images locally, your artwork will appear significantly faster.

It’s more reliable

We found some bugs. We were sent crash reports. And we tested for days on end. We think we’ve made SongBook significantly more reliable, but only you can tell us if that is the case. We do know for sure though that we have found and removed all crashes that have had reported to us.

It’s more flexible

We made a lot of improvements to the user interface too. You can now see large album art without rotating the screen, but if you do rotate the screen all your views will still work. We’ve added more detail to the interface, such as an album view that shows your album art at the top of the view and lists the tracks below, rather than repeating the same image for every track. Tracks that are in your play queue are highlighted, so you can see right in the Library what you have added.

And we’ve made the volume slider easier to use.

It’s Done

I know that a few people noticed that we were not very talkative lately, the support emails have been slower to be replied, and my personal email is a bit behind. It was a huge effort to get all this complete with all tests passing, but things should get back to normal now.

Thanks to John at Definitive Audio in Seattle I received a new iPad direct from USA. It only arrived last Friday and we have been testing with it constantly since then. Actually the code all worked perfectly on the iPad, but the user interface needed some work. The real time was spent on getting the same code working correctly on both devices with significantly differing user interfaces.

I guess what you really want to see are screenshots, so here they are…

SongBook Mac by Country

May 1st, 2010 0

We made a quick graph of where the SongBook Mac customers come from, I thought that people may be interested in seeing where the users are.

SongBookMacCountries.jpg

It’s interesting for us as I think the numbers relate closely to the amount of publicity we have received in each of the countries. It’s hard to tell if this is cause or effect, but we have had the most press coverage in Germany, and sales are strongest there. We also had some initial publicity in Japan early on, and this is a strong market too.

I think that the most interesting thing though is the diversity of the countries in the list.