Can I customize the Astiga Android app's home page?
DMcR
Member
in Astiga app
New user, and I find the app's home page to be too busy. I mostly use the alphabetical album list, genres, and alphabetical artist list. I would sometimes use recently played. THis I don't use stars random, recents, most or decades.
So I'd like to be able to remove what for me is clutter.
And under those lists, is there a way to bring up a tappable alphabet to quickly select a subset of artists or albums starting with, say, 'T' (as in The ...). Maybe an alphabet page that appears, like when I click on Decades?
Thanks. Dennis
Comments
Agree with this - customisation is something we're looking at doing soon for the iOS app, which will also become the Android app in time.
The fast-forward-to-start-character idea has been mentioned before, it's a good one. It's not supported in the Android but we'll consider it for the new app.
Note there are other apps you can use: https://play.asti.ga/apps . Check out Tempo and Tempus also which seem to be getting a bit of support. And Symfonium if you can entertain a paid option. (Edit: I see in the other thread you've already been using that).
Yes, I have been looking at other apps as well. There isn't too much out there for Android that is still supported except for yours and for Symfonium (no, as a retired software developer, I am not averse to paying for software. We need to eat too! :-)). And as I mentioned in another thread, the latter currently has a bug that prevents syncing, and so I'm waiting for the bug fix in their next release.
But regarding the other Android apps, Ultrasonic, SubTune, DSub, and Tempo all appear to no longer be actively maintained.
There is now DSub2000 which appears to be a fork of the original DSub and is maintained. But it is mostly a clone of your Astiga app (e.g., similar home page and settings) with fewer features. It has albums and genres filters under Home in the menu. But artists are hidden under the Library entry. And all you get when you click on one (or on an artist combo) is the entire album they appear on, even if they just appeared on a subset of tracks.
And similarly, there is now Tempus (thanks for the pointer, I was not aware of this one), which appears to be new developers working on a fork of the Tempo code base. Not on Play Store yet, but available from Github and F-Droid/IzzyOnDroid, though the developer says there are more features in the Github APK. v4.25.5 (latest) is definitely a Beta version: Hard to log in (password field was set up as multi-line field by mistake). Attractive UI and does have an Artists filter, but only Artists and Albums work. Genres is broken and shows no albums for any genre. Also no Album Artists filter. And like the Astiga app, there is no quick jump-to-a-letter for the album and artist lists. Also, like DSub2000, no subset-of-tracks view for artists that only appear in some tracks; it always shows entire album for every artist and artists combo (Astiga app definitely superior here). So I would say this app, while very pretty, is too much form-over-function for my taste, and needs more QA.
Thanks for your round-up. Of the mobile and Android clients, Tempus does appear to have most momentum at the moment. Most work seems to be on desktop clients, FWIW.
The fast-forward-to-start-character feature is a very important feature for usability when you have a lot of albums and artists. Scrolling is slow because after 1-2 screen-fulls the app pauses to refresh the cache. So it's scroll and wait, scroll and wait - many times if the letter you are after is late in the alphabet. Just my opinion...
Thanks. For reference I've found there's something in Android called "fast scroll" which automatically shows a bubble on the right of a list when you hold down and move it. The interesting thing is that it looks like the Astiga app tries to do this, although I only ever see "#" and "*".
Here's how it works for more modern UI - including the framework by which the iOS app, which I hope will become the Android app, is drawn - is this what you had in mind? https://ekeitho.medium.com/building-google-contacts-screen-and-its-scrolling-bubble-feature-in-compose-1f8b7e292df
Actually, this is better than what I had in mind. I have used this in some apps and it is very very helpful. The one thing you'd need to make sure of is: the cache refreshes should not occur until the user is done scrolling, otherwise the scrolling won't be smooth.
Would be great of both your IOS and Android apps had this!
👍🏽