Posted by Michael Mahemoff on May 13th, 2013
Wow! It’s been two weeks since launching the apps, and Player FM received more feedback in that time than in 11 months of being online as a website, a mobile-friendly one even. Here’s a run-down of how we’ve responded to feedback so far…
Search
Browsing is great, but not enough for people who already have a specific show in mind. You can now search for any series to subscribe to, a familiar feature to users of many other podcatcher apps. If you’ve seen the website’s search, you’ll know Player FM can do much more than this and we’ll eventually integrate more advanced search features into the app.
Import OPML
Podcasting thankfully has an industry standard for imports and exports: OPML. So it’s easy to bring subscriptions in from iTunes or other players, and now Player FM supports this directly in the app. In the event we don’t yet have a series indexed, you can submit it and we’re generally adding them within a few hours; but we’ll also automate this process soon too.
Incidentally, you can export OPML from Player FM subscriptions too. Just add .opml to your channel’s URL. e.g. http://player.fm/michael.opml
Bandwidth Controls
We’ve added several more settings to control auto-updates, and warnings about bandwidth impact of streaming 3G episodes. Furthermore, we’ve now added these settings into the signup process, so users can set up their main preferences without even going into Settings. The view below is present in the current version and will be simplified in the next.
Better Image Loading
Image loading was sluggish at times. We were using a technique to ensure low memory usage, but we needed to tweak settings further to ensure images would load quickly. But what happens when images don’t load? For example, your wifi drops out just after adding a channel. We’ve improved from those “blank images” to incorporate the series title.
And More …
Among other updates:
- The notification can close itself now. When paused, it shows an “X” button. Simples.
- Signup is possible in landscape mode. We’re not yet tabtastic, but it’s an okay experience now.
- Media library option. Funnily enough, people don’t like seeing podcasts appear in their music playlists, e.g. when using Google Music. So we’ve turned this off. But since some people do need this, for integration with apps and hardware, you can turn it back on. Find the option in Auto-Download settings.
- Bug fixes. There’s always bug fixes. And we have this ready to go for Android version 2.3 users.
Posted by Michael Mahemoff on May 5th, 2013
Quick summary
If you’re using Player FM for Android installed before Friday, May 3 (PST) (version 1.0.0 to version 1.0.6, inclusive), it’s strongly recommended to update — you can do so from the following Play link.
Important: Please update Player FM for Android
This is especially important if it’s on a mobile having limited bandwidth limits.
This bug , related to excessive image downloading, has now been fixed, along with many other related changes to reduce bandwidth, make usage clearer, and give users more options in these matters. Incidentally, you’ll also benefit from a number of other enhancements to the app, including the introduction of search and OPML importing, and an improved notification widget. Those features will be covered in a subsequent post, as this bandwidth incident warrants a post all of its own.
What happened?
I started to receive reports of excessive mobile bandwidth usage 2 days after launch (first report on Tuesday). While waiting for clarifications, I decided we should make some educated guesses and start working on it. At first, I assumed it was due to people streaming online content. In other words, a UX problem where it wasn’t clear what’s streamed and what’s played locally. For this reason, we scrambled to re-design the Settings page to make things more clear, add a warning that shows the first time the user streams an episode, and update the FAQ.
Further queries indicated this was not the issue. I thought it might be related to the periodic updates, Player FM’s equivalent of checking RSS feeds. In fact, Player FM’s cloud based approach should make this more efficient than a regular podcatcher, because the server takes care of polling all of the user’s subscriptions, and also because the server uses HTTP best practices to return quick responses and caching to prevent the same response being repeatedly fetched. However, it could still cause in the order of 10s of MB weekly downloads (similar to what a traditional podcatcher might consume); so we added further features to configure this in the settings. Users can now turn off those updates while on 3G.
However, as we looked further on Friday, we discovered the issue was more straightforward. A straightforward bug was causing images, in certain conditions to be re-downloaded on these periodic updates. We’re still analysing the details, but the fix that went live on Friday fixed this issue, and we’ve subsequently added a further update (1.0.8) that downloads pre-rendered, efficiently cached images, instead of downloading them directly from the publishers’ sites. While most publishers have efficient feeds, they still vary widely from each other and some can have problems on occasion; so it’s more efficient for us to serve them via a fast proxy. We’re using Cloudinary, the same service which has reliably cached series images on the Player FM website.
What’s next?
We’re not stopping here. If it’s practical, we’ll provide estimates on mobile bandwidth depending on the user’s settings. We already have that for storage use, where we make a storage estimate based on the user’s actual settings and subscriptions. We’ll make some of this configurable in the initial setup process too, to the extent that we can keep it simple too. And we’ll also be working this week to improve the image display process overall; the default mic icons are showing up too often, instead of the series images. It’s a well-intentioned technique aiming to reduce the app’s memory footprint and make it run smoother; but we can do better to get the best of both worlds.
We’ll also be adding in-app support for suggesting or requiring updates if necessary.
Most importantly, I’ll be far more vigilant about mobile bandwidth issues in the future. I care a lot about bandwidth usage and flexibility, which is why we launched with a lot of flexibility over download options. I’m sorry this bug arose. It slipped past us in the lead-up to launch and I’ll now be watching mobile bandwidth usage much closer.
Posted by Michael Mahemoff on April 28th, 2013
We are launching Player FM’s Android app today.
While the website has been mobile since Day One, a native app allows us to get the best out of the mobile form factor and Android platform. For a podcast app, this means more than the usual look-and-feel factor, as important as that is. It means syncing episodes for offline listening, playing in the background [1], and controlling playback via interactive widgets and notifications.
Update: GigaOM review
Play A Topic, Any Topic
No more hunting through catalogues to find a decent show. A unique feature of Player FM is the way it aggregates by topic. Instead of just playing a single show, you can play an entire topic, and there are 300+ to choose from. Here’s how the Android topic looks in series mode, where you can jump into any series:
… and in episode mode:
You’ll find the same playable topic on the Player FM website. Starring it there will cause it to be starred in the Player FM app.
Getting Started
We’ve taken the app through several months of private beta testing to ensure it’s easy to get started, even for people who haven’t tried podcasting before. It’s possible to try the app without signup, and signup is possible via the new Google+ Login as well as conventional username/password. After signup, there’s an onboarding process to choose favorite topics:
First-time users will also see a convenient suggestions tool to help them build their subscriptions channel.
All this is sync’d with the website. Website users can just log in to find their favorites waiting for them.
Detailed views
It’s not all topics. You can still drill down to an individual series to see shownotes, stats, and all episodes in their feed:
Like a traditional podcast app, users can subscribe to a series by adding it to their channel, and syncing happens fast because the server already knows the state of each feed.
You can also view an individual episode, with shownotes:
Offline use
The user’s own channel is available for offline use. By default, the most recent 10 episodes are auto-downloaded and users can tweak this limit, as well as other download settings.
More to come
I’m excited to be getting out this 1.0 release, but there’s much more to come, so stay tuned and let me know what you’d like to see. Just submit a suggestion or mail mike@player.fm.
Special thanks to Martin and Geng for their development and design efforts, respectively. And thanks also to the beta testers who have made this a much different product.
Please note we are not affiliated with any of the podcasts shown in these screenshots. Most days we’re lucky if we can string a sentence together and we’re sticking to our day job. And when it comes to the Android Robot, let’s just say “The Android robot is reproduced or modified from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.”
1. While Android browser, and now Android Chrome, play in the background, there’s no way to tell the operating system “hey this is important, don’t shut me down to free up memory.
Posted by Michael Mahemoff on April 12th, 2013
Running a cloud podcast app comes with the duty to keep it working, occasionally take it down for upgrades, and notify about downtimes. And you don’t want this here blog cluttered with notices like that, so meet the Player FM status blog.
Posted by Michael Mahemoff on April 4th, 2013
Player FM now supports Google Plus sign-in and sharing.
The signup page overall got a much-needed facelift too. ABP … Always be prettifying!
Social signup will make it easier to show you what your friends are subscribed to..that’s *if( they’ve made their channel public, since it’s now possible to set make profiles and channels private (everything was previously public). I’m still talking to the G+ platform team to iron out the friend discovery capability.
The share buttons on each episode have always been powered by ShareThis, but if you hit the Google button in the middle and allow the popup, it actually works as a special Google Plus share. Which ends up looking like this:
Should you sign in with Google, Player FM will show up in your profile. Neat, eh?
On a technical note, this is actually the third iteration of Google logins for Player FM, and hopefully the last! I launched with Open ID login, mainly because the decision seemed arbitrary at the time and I wanted to get the site up and running. As I begun development on an Android app, I soon learned OAuth is the way forward for Google, so switched over accounts in a somewhat awkward process. I’ve since de-commissioned those accounts which never logged in to make the move. And just when I was completing that exercise, Google made their big Plus announcements. Having battled through the migration to OAuth, I wanted to be sure we understood the implications of this before putting the Android app in the wild. So it too will support G+ login.
Posted by Michael Mahemoff on January 11th, 2013
Update: As noted on The Verge, this feature is now in standard Chrome for Android. Thanks Nelson for the pointer.
With the release of Chrome Beta, Android now has full-fledged HTML5 audio support akin to that of iOS, BlackBerry, and other operating systems. The new behaviour ensures that MP3s will continue to play even when the user switches tabs, switches apps, or turns off the screen.
Third-party browsers might also have done this already, but Chrome is supported on Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) and for Jellybean (Android 4.1 and 4.2), it’s become the standard browser; also, it’s worth noting that Android browser is also slow and buggy. Chrome is the future of Android HTML5 audio.
A Bug Reported, A Bug Squashed
If you’ve ever tried walking and listening to music or podcasts on your phone, you’ll pretty quickly realise you can’t do it with the phone screen on. Your pocket will quickly conspire to switch the application, hit the home button, or send a gibberish SMS to your boss.
Turning off the screen, even switching tabs, wasn’t allowed with Android Chrome. I notified the team of this bug eight months ago, shortly after Chrome came out:
What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Start playing audio
2. Click home or long-hold to switch to another app
What is the expected result?
Audio keeps playing
What happens instead?
Audio stops.
So a web app that plays MP3s was simply not possible. There’s no way a music or podcast app, running a browser, can compete with a native app if the user needs to keep the browser app active, the current tab active, and the screen on.
There were many months of silence, during which time I tried to raise the issue through various channels. The first posting from a member of the Chrome team, some five months later, mentioned inability to raise notifications being a deal-breaker for another app (in fairness, it had been a deal-breaker all along to various MP3-playing apps like Grooveshark and Player FM).
The bug was swiftly fixed after being raised by an insider, but it looked like there would be several months wait for it to filter into the official release on Google Play. But wait no more! A surprise was in store and the timing worked well. Today, Chrome has made the savvy, developer-friendly, move of launching a separate Chrome Beta app. Like the desktop beta channel, it gives developers and early adopters early access to the latest features, and I’m pleased to see the audio bugfix is present from Day 1 of the Beta release. Hopefully, it will enter actual Chrome in a month or two.
Download Chrome Beta from Google Play and experience HTML5 audio as it should be. You can hit up Player FM, turn the screen off, and play from your pocket. None of this says a native app isn’t important for podcasts – it still has benefits like offline support – but web audio definitely just got a whole lot better for Android users.
Posted by Michael Mahemoff on January 1st, 2013
Happy New Year! I hope you had a good break and picked up one or two new gadgets to play with. Maybe you discovered a few new podcasts too, in which case, read on …
When I upgraded to the new look a couple weeks back, I mentioned that OPML import was missing. It’s now back again, meaning you can add feeds from other podcast apps.
This tool will show you the feed if we already have it; otherwise, it will look it up and add it to Player FM.
The new OPML import is hopefully a bit more friendly in a couple of ways. First, it auto-refreshes, unlike the original OPML, which said “it will update in a few minutes” but didn’t tell you when it was ready. Second, the OPML import doesn’t automatically subscribe you to the shows you’ve imported. You can hit the Subscribe button next to those you want to add into Player FM.
As well as OPML import, there’s also the ability to add a list of raw URLs. These can be feed URLs, but also – another new capability – you can add iTunes web pages as well as general web pages. The web page functionality relies on RSS Auto-discovery, so won’t always be supported by the publisher, but iTunes web pages should be quite reliable.
Posted by Michael Mahemoff on December 18th, 2012
I’ve made a small change to the login process for Google-connected accounts. It won’t have much impact, but here’s a little FAQ to explain what you might see if connecting with Google. I’ll also explain the technical details at the end of the FAQ.
I log into Player FM with Google. How does this change affect me?
If you’re currently logged in, it won’t affect you. It will only affect you the next time you log into Player FM.
When you next click the Google button to log into Player FM, you’ll be asked to authorize Player FM, like you were the first time you connected. This will only happen once and once you agree, everything is back to normal. You can keep logging in via Google.
I’m having problems logging in. Help!
I’ve done a lot of testing for this change, but if something goes wrong, please mail mike@player.fm.
I log into Player FM with Twitter. How does this change affect me?
It won’t affect you at all.
I log into Player FM with the “classic” username/password mechanism. How does this change affect me?
It won’t affect you at all.
What are the technical details?
Instead of connecting via openID, the Google button will now connect via OAuth. They are both pretty similar for this purpose, but oAuth has become more popular and more recommended lately. Firstly, it allows users to give fine-grained permissions. Secondly, OpenID is very much a web protocol these days; oAuth works better when connecting from other systems.
Posted by Michael Mahemoff on December 15th, 2012
Welcome to the new-look Player FM. The new UI has been designed to make it easy to jump between channels, to overview a channels at a glance, and to show your own channel in more places.
Following responsive design principles as always, these enhancements are available to users of mobiles, tablets, and desktops at any size.
Side Menu: Topic-Surf With Ease
The new side menu allows you to explore all of our topics. It’s shown on the homepage so you can always find it by typing in player.fm. And it’s shown on topic pages, as well as your own channel page, so you can easily jump off to another topic.
Carousel: Explore A Channel’s Composition
The carousel on top of each channel shows the series that make it up. You can slide it left and right, and swipe it on touch devices. Clicking on a series will scroll down the page to the relevant entry.
Episodes Front and Center
You’ll notice the new design emphasises individual episodes much more, being the main element in the middle of the page. These are the things that change the most, so these are the things you’ll want to see first when visiting a topic page or looking at your own channel.
Your Stuff
Content from your own channel is now shown in the right sidebar, bringing your favourite episodes to many more places as you browse the site.
News-Y Sidebar
Posts from Player FM’s blog and social accounts are now available on the homepage.
Lots of Tweaks
You’ll also notice lots of small changes, with more to come. One important point for regular users: Channels no longer have an Edit button. The separate Edit mode wasn’t very useful, because most of the time users just manage their channel by hitting Subscribe and Unsubscribe buttons on their own channel and elsewhere. One thing it did allow advanced users to do is to bring new series into Player FM. To that end, I’ve made available a new feed importer tool which is available from the Edit tab on your own channel. I’ll also bring back OPML imports, and in a more intuitive way.
Posted by Michael Mahemoff on November 26th, 2012
The DuckDuckGo search engine has grown and grown over recent years, now serving over a million queries per day I’m pleased to announce DuckDuckGo has now integrated Player FM’s podcast search, using their “!Bang” feature for cross-site searches. This is helpful for anyone doing research on a topic, who decides they want to burrow deeper and maybe even play a conversation in the background while continuing with their research on the topic.
If you haven’t seen DuckDuckGo’s !Bang before, here’s an example. The !youtube query below will redirect over to YouTube and continue searching for the query there.
Now, with the new Player FM Bang, DuckDuckGo users can search over 600,000 live podcast episodes by appending !player to their search:
This will take you straight to Player FM’s search results:
Power searchers will be pleased to note Player FM’s custom search grammar works right from inside the DuckDuckGo search box:
The quotes and minus sign entered on DuckDuckGo are acknowledged by Player FM:
That’s all for now. I’ll be introducing a major user-interface upgrade on homepage and channel pages soon, but meanwhile, give !player a whirl at DuckDuckGo!