Q: Is it too easy to hit play/streaming when you meant to tap download?

[JNavas]

This issue is covered well in Android Design and exemplified in signature apps such as Gmail and Music.

Long press menus are now deprecated. Note how Music has the new universal menu symbol on each track, which pops up the available actions, clean, simple, and easy for average folks to understand and use. An example of the inconsistency in BP is the episode entry in the Episodes screen versus the episode entry in the Feed screen, which leads to confusion.

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Update: An example of quirky operation that impairs usability is the layout of the Player screen. Despite the fact that player controls exist, touching much of the screen toggles between Play and Pause, making it all too easy to play or pause accidentally. By comparison, Music only responds to player controls. Even if the BP approach were better (it's not), the inconsistency hurts usability.

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[grandrollerz]

Just wanted to voice my appreciation for the tips to enable optimized for reading and turning off automatic playlist. Losing my playlist because I fat fingered the Add button was driving me insane!!! Hoping the new version addresses this more intuitively. Other than that, loving BP.

[juwlz]

Thanks. There are other changes in the beta releases that address this too.

[PaulG]

This has been much, much less of a problem for me since I turned off streaming and switched to Optimize For Reading, which is great, but I do still find that it is intermittently a problem. I haven't been able to 100% pin it down, but I think it happens when an episode contains no show notes. I haven't tested this in the latest beta version so maybe it is fixed, but I would prefer if the "Optimize for reading" behavior were that only pressing the icon causes the item to play, or if "Optimize for reading" were switched to a 3-choice selector with an additional option to simply disable playing from the feed entirely. Frankly, when this does happen now, I'm a lot less bothered by it because of the no-streaming thing, and because with the new native multi-speed implementation, BeyondPod is a LOT more stable (Presto had become increasingly unstable and any weird thing like suddenly adding a new playlist item and starting to play it could have a tendancy to freeze the whole interface).

[alex_loo]

The nuisance described here happens sometimes to me, but I don't see this a priority one issue to be addressed. Having said that, I agree that if this is to be fixed, limiting play/stream to the episode icon is a good solution.

Can I also add that the nuisance can also happen when I try to click the garbage bin, but end up adding the episode to the playlist.

One suggested solution is to change the colour of the episode title (red/green) when the garbage bin/ add playlist button is touched, and proceed with the action when the fingered is lifted. Then if the wrong colour is shown, I can slide my finger to the right button (confirmed with change of colour) before releasing my finger.

[juwlz]

The nuisance described here happens sometimes to me, but I don't see this a priority one issue to be addressed. Having said that, I agree that if this is to be fixed, limiting play/stream to the episode icon is a good solution.

That's already available, by selecting Optimise for Reading in the Feed content Settings.

[alex_loo]

That's already available, by selecting Optimise for Reading in the Feed content Settings.

Great! Thanks.

[JNavas]

One suggested solution is to change the colour of the episode title (red/green) when the garbage bin/ add playlist button is touched, and proceed with the action when the fingered is lifted. Then if the wrong colour is shown, I can slide my finger to the right button (confirmed with change of colour) before releasing my finger.

With respect, while that solution could be good for you, it's inconsistent with Android Design, would most likely be confusing to average users, and would thus be a bad idea in my opinion. Platform consistency is vital to ease of learning and ease of use, and BP already suffers from too much inconsistency.

[Buckarooster]

Yes this is one of my only complaints about the program. Very frustrating!

[kore7]

Absolutely, yes!

What's even more infuriating is when I'm trying to free up space on my SD card by quickly going through my podcasts and deleting downloaded episodes. Since I'm a multi-tasker, I often do this *while* I'm listening to a different episode on BeyondPod. About half the time, the app thinks I meant to *play* the episode instead of *deleting* it, which means the episode I'm listening to gets interrupted unexpectedly by an episode I had no interest in! Because of BeyondPod's interface, I then have to stop playback, and navigate back through all the panes to find the exact same episode I was listening to before. It makes me wary of deleting a downloaded episode each time I have to do it.