Astiga roadmap - 2024
Following last year's roadmap and the excellent feedback we had from it, I wanted to produce a new roadmap for 2024. This is to communicate our priorities for the product development of Astiga over the short term (meaning the next six months to a year).
As ever, delays happen and priorities shift, sometimes due to unforeseen events, so this roadmap should really just be considered a general guide as to the things we will be working on, rather than a hard and fast, timeboxed commitment. Furthermore, the items below are kept deliberately high-level because the actual concrete features we decice to implement will be guided by feedback and what we learnn as we make profress.
How we decided the roadmap
We take opinions and input from numerous routes:
- This forum.
- Responses to surveys of active users.
- Emails we receive.
- Developments in the market, and the opportunities presented by new technological developments.
- Analysis of feature use.
Last year...
Last year we followed the roadmap pretty closely. We made particular progress in updating the UI/UX of the Web app. Library browsing was enhanced by improvements to ratings and adding sorting and filtering functionality to library browsing. We also concentrated on playlists - making them a first class entity, allowing their editing outside of the play queue, re-ordering and more.
So what about this coming year?
This year's feature direction will be focused on the following areas:
- Improved library browsing and navigation.
- App improvements.
- Playlist improvements.
This is an intentionally tight and limited set of areas. This doesn't mean we won't work on other things in feature development, e.g. low hanging fruit like adding filters and sort criteria or whatever. It's just the above are the main, broad focuses for genuinely new code.
More to follow below! 👇️
Comments
Improved library browsing and navigation
This is where we're going to start making our first major 'strategic' advances to combining the bliss, OneMusicAPI and Astiga products.
Your library of albums, artists, tracks, genres and so on is built during an Astiga "sync" process. Currently, only the information present in your library is used for this.
We're going to supercharge sync. We get a lot of comments that Astiga users' libraries take a lot of work to tune and groom until they look good. So, feedback permitting, we're going to work to improve the consistency, correctness and completeness of your music library, automatically. This will be an optional feature, because we know a lot of people will want to see their library verbatim. And there are no plans to actually change your library; these data will just be stored and presented to you via Astiga.
Our intention is to gradually build a way of presenting your library in its best light, with zero effort from you.
To make it a little more concrete (but hopefully not too concrete as to commit to specific features) consider:
These are very much examples to try to illustrate the concept; they aren't priorities.
This is a major project and will be delivered in the best way I've learnt: piecemeal, with continual feedback. As I said above, this feature will be optional with the current behaviour retained. Feel free to ask questions, and if you'd like to be involved in testing :-)
👇️
App improvements
Using Astiga to sync music with mobile devices and listen on-the-move is one of the most common benefits of the platform; it's mentioned a lot in responses to the surveys we conduct. Therefore we think it's important to continually improve this side of the service.
We're going to look to improve the usability of the mobile app. This was mentioned in the last roadmap although not very specifically and it was a lower priority. We're going to take a fresh look at the UX of the Android app. Not only should we look at re-arranging how some of the UI currently works and fixing a few long standing bugs, but also there have been a number of developments in the Subsonic API which mean we may be able to start offering more useful information in the app.
At the same time, and also mentioned previously, the above work will hopefully give us a chance to re-organise some of the app code so that an iOS version is easier to maintain at the same time as the Android one.
👇️
Playlists
We still think the remaining items in the playlist priorities we had last year are valid. However, compared to previously there will be less work on playlists this year, as we made good strides last year. So:
👇️
It's driven by you
Those are the main areas we'll concentrate on, then. As above, this is all driven by feedback, so be sure to let us know how you think the features are developing, and what you think is missing. You can do that in this thread, or open new threads to discuss. And, of course, you can always email us directly.
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