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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Mobile Media Manager and a Progress Update for it

If you have been wondering where I've been this February since I haven't done much posting, I've been working on development of my media player app for Windows Phone, Mobile Media Manager. The goal of Mobile Media Manager is to make a media player that is better than the Zune player that comes with Windows Phone and fulfills as many needs/wants as (humanly) possible. To do this, I looked at the competition and did some observations based on user reviews and what I thought could be improved.

Here is a screenshot of the player screen:


This is the basic state of the player, simple, yet still usable. A big part of the interface is big playback buttons. There are a number of reasons why they are big. One reason is if you're in the car, driving, you don't really have (enough) time to look over at your phone to see the screen and change the song. Another reason is for men with big hands who might have a hard time with the small button size in the zune player (although, I will admit that the playback button size in mango is a big improvement over playback button size in nodo). Repeat and shuffle have been moved to the bottom as buttons in the application bar. To see the state of each, just open up the menu to see the descriptions of the application bar buttons. Where you see the message "No Album Art Found" is where album art would be displayed, or you will see the message if there is none to be displayed. In a future version, I will add the capability to fetch album art from the internet if it's not there, but I am not sure when that will actually be.

If you're curious, I have also built in gesture support (just swipe your finger) for moving forward or backward through the Now Playing list (but not for play/pause).

In progress updates, I have revamped the Now Playing screen and Playlist Editor screen. I am also working on implementing choosing a photo in your photo library as the background and being able to add songs from a url for streaming. As things are very busy for me at school right now, I am trying to do my best to find time to work on the program, but things can get rough at times.


It helps tremendously if I can get reviews in the marketplace. From there, I can get a feel for how my app is doing and also get suggestions to improve the app. I can't do much if I don't get input from the users in the marketplace. So if you have tried either the free version or bought the paid version, please write a review. So far, I have only received 1 review for the paid version (thank you if you are the one who gave me the 3 star review and some helpful tips to improve) and 2 for the free version, of which 1 just says "this app crashes". Something like that is not going to help me much, so if you are going to give suggestions in addition to a rating, please be more descriptive.


Download (for paid version): http://bit.ly/y3rf6V

Download (for free, ad-supported version): http://bit.ly/xGCsWE


If you like I can continue to explain the other screens of my program during my next post. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me via the comment box below or via e-mail at catholictechgeek@gmail.com. You can subscribe to my rss feed or follow me on Twitter (username is @rctechgeek).

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