Navigation on the Feed Content Screen is Awkward

[mweb]

Please allow us to navigate from the Feed Content Screen to the Player. Sometimes I want to brown only podcasts from a specific feed and I choose to start playing from in this view, however now to go to the Play screen I have to navigate back to the Feeds screen then over to the Player screen. You should be able to access the Player screen from anywhere in BP with one click, especially when there is a podcast playing.

Also, why did you disable the ability to navigate by swiping in this screen. Swipe navigation is available in every other screen: Feeds, Episodes & Player (Thank you), but not in the Feed Content Screen? That's a little frustrating because I get used to navigating a certain way but can't maintain the convention throughout the app.

Finally, why did you make tapping on the episode notes summary play and pause pause the podcast? The way you used to have it was very intuitive. It makes sense that when I click on the thumbnail with the Play/Pause overlay, it will play and pause and when I click on the episode notes summary it will show the full notes. Now unless I click on the seemingly arbitrarily defined far left portion I ended up playing and pausing when I click on the words I want to read.

(btw: sorry if I sound ungrateful, I wanted to get straight to the point. All in all I think you did a great job with the redesign.)

[RED ZMAN]

X10000

I've been asking for this. The new navigation for the phone version is so inefficient, I actually went to dogcatcher for a bit. I'm using Beyondpod again now on the phone, but sparingly. i finally upgraded my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 to CM9, so I can use the beautiful tablet version of BP, and it doesn't have this problem.

[Skinsk]

I agree. I'd like it to be easier to get to the player once I start an episode.

[StefanK]

mweb,

Thank you very much for the feedback. It nicely captures the main issues that we have to solve.

With the new design, the "Feed Content Screen" became a different window while the player remained in the main window - this is why there was no way to "swipe" to it. This has been fixed in 3.0.9 - where we added a player to the right side of the feed content view so it now supports the same swipe navigation as the main view.

As far as what happens when you tap on episode, we decided to make it work that way because this is what is the expectation of most new users. We initially experimented with it working the way you suggest, but almost all (new) users we gave it to, got quickly confused - they did not expect text and icon to do different actions (I don't think any popular Android application that does that - icon and text are always a single item). I fully agree that once you know that it works that way, it makes a good sense, but we decided to stick with what is commonly expected and find another way to deal with show notes. That being said, we made a small UI change in the next (3.0.10) build that provides a better indication how to get to the episode notes. This should alleviate the confusion, providing a visible target where to tap for episode notes.

[JimShoe]

I would like to see the player open when you tap on an episode. Right now I tap the episode it starts to play then I have to move to the player screen. Its a little Awkward. Also nice icon for the notes, I like it alot.

[juwlz]

Agreed ... as long as the Back button takes you back to wherever you were when you started playing, in case you started playing it by accident.

Julie

[StefanK]

This is on our list for 3.1 (to get it work right it needs some "tricky" changes in the player screen so we decided to leave it for the next release).