Swipe to enqueue is confusing

agersant / polaris-android

Android client for Polaris

https://github.com/agersant/polaris

MIT License

62 stars 7 forks source link

Swipe to enqueue is confusing #21

Open lnicola opened 4 years ago

lnicola commented 4 years ago

I almost filed an issue saying that the app doesn't work for me, because I couldn't figure out how to use it.

Some suggestions:

make the inactive icons on the bottom navigation bar look different, or at least a lighter shade of gray. I thought they were disabled.
add long tap menu in the collection browser with options like "play now", "add to queue" and maybe "add next". The swipe action is hard to discover.
the shuffle action would probably work better as a toggle, but I don't feel strongly about it, and I can see the advantages

Sorry for the nitpicking :-).

agersant commented 4 years ago

Thanks for the valuable feedback!

For the bottom navigation, I wonder if it's a bug where it's not looking as intended? It's supposed to look like this: https://material.io/components/bottom-navigation/
Good idea. Someone else also left a review on the play store complaining about the swipe pattern too. Will implement.
I originally implemented shuffle as a playback order, like repeat-one and repeat-all. However, deciding what track to play next when the current one ends made it impossible to preload the next tracks accurately. This isn't completely unsolvable but I think it's too complex to be worth the effort.

lnicola commented 4 years ago

Ah, sorry, it must be my phone's dark theme.

Screenshot_20200212-221716

I agree about the others, maybe let's keep this open for the menu thing?

agersant commented 4 years ago

That screenshot does look like the intended look. I'l try out one step brighter, might be a nice improvement.

agersant commented 4 years ago

I took a quick stab at this over there: https://github.com/agersant/polaris-android/tree/browser-contextual-menus

Adding the contextual menu was pretty straightforward - but complications soon followed. Because it's possible to queue remote directories, we must show some kind of progress indicator while listing the content of the directory. This operation can take a while for large directories. With the swipe UI, this is done by keeping the row in its swiped position with a Fetching… text on it.

I experimented a bit with ways to manually trigger an animation similar to the swipe to indicate progress in the same way. That doesn't feel like a great solution. I also didn't get it to a working state, because as always, doing anything with Android is complicated :(

lnicola commented 4 years ago

I took a quick stab at this over there: https://github.com/agersant/polaris-android/tree/browser-contextual-menus

Sorry, I don't have an Android toolchain set up and it might take a while for me to get one running, so I'm not going to test it.

With the swipe UI, this is done by keeping the row in its swiped position with a Fetching… text on it.

I don't have an opinion about this. Adding a "Fetching..." line would work for me, but might look a little janky.

To be honest, maybe the swipe UI is totally fine and I'm just not used to it. I run into this from time to time -- a couple of days ago I contacted the Bolt support because I wasn't able to remove a credit card from their app.

Apparently, swipe gestures are fine according to Google: https://material.io/design/interaction/gestures.html#types-of-gestures. I don't know, maybe it's fine to close this as an user error :-).