FF Improvements

[edzzik]

Hi Marcus,

I just put on a very long audiobook (10 hours) that I used to listen to on the iPod. I had to fast forward 8 hours to get to the location where I last left off. With the current FF method, it took me quite ome time to get to the desired location. It would be real cool if we could select the progress bar and use the trackball for position searching. This would give the user excellent control of the rate of change depending on the speed of the trackball movement. (Kind of like the iPod with the wheel). Also, it seems that all the current keyboard shortcuts FF 30 seconds (I am using the bold). I was also curious to ask why the period was chiosen as one of the keyboard shortcuts, since you have to pree the alt key before pressing the period.

What are your thoughts on these?

Thanks,
Ed

[marwatk]

Hi Ed,

For the curve and bold q and p should work as FF and RW keys. (It also allows for # and @ in case alt-lock is on). The . and ! are there for pearl users (their top left and top right alt keys). Basically, on whichever phone you have, the top right and top left keys on the keyboard should always do a fast forward or rewind with one press, regardless of the state of alt or shift.

The trackball thing might be.. difficult. I'm not entirely opposed to it, but it's probably not going to happen any time soon. What I may do is have the 5 second skip (since it's fairly useless going forward) be the 30 second skip, and replace the 30 second skip with something that skips x% of whatever is playing. That may be a short term fix until I do something more useful (like trackwheel selection, though even that would be prone to issues).

The 30 second thing is useful for podcasts, but now that it supports playing any file on the device (like audiobooks), I think it needs to be a bit smarter about it.

-Marcus

[jkernsjr]

I also would like to see the ability to use the trackball for fast-forwarding through audio. This is how the media player on the BB works.

As I understand it may be hard and take a while to implement this, is it possible to make the FF key step through in increments as you hold it down?

Later,
John

[marwatk]

Hi John, I'll add it to the list.

-Marcus

[countstex]

As this functionality exists in the inbuilt media player, perhaps an option to show files with over 2 hours in the Media Player only might be an interim solution? I know you can show all in MP at present, but I'm guessing most prefer to listen in PT itself, so just something to show the long files over there might be a quick win?

[marwatk]

I released 1.8.6 yesterday (but forgot to post about it). It handles seeking much better than previous versions in that you can press the button many times and have it consolidate all of the presses into a single seek. Can you try it out and let me know if this is sufficient, or if further work would be better?

-Marcus