guyverzero

As for the first part, its an assumption. If the guy will not pay/does not want to have others helping him with core dev work as a sole developer. I would assume that desire for complete creative control of your product would extend to the official Poweramp twitter account. And yes. A "rather cute" reply is a troll. I don't see the term as malicious, but rather just making fun of. That can be lighthearted and funny. In fact, it is lighthearted and funny, but it also has to be taken in context. With that context, it doesn't look too good. The other reply that you keep echoing, the "make a better product" is completely true. No one has managed to do it so far, but I talked about that in my reply. I think that if people had the incentive to make money, a better product (who knows if it would have been an equal) may have come out by now. But the constant carrot dangling dissuades development, because if you spend your time on something good when a new version of a million dollar app could be released at any moment you might not see the financial incentive in doing so. Even if the app were to be "better" it would be extremely hard to get people to switch over en masse unless the Poweramp dev made it clear that updates were going to be as infrequent as they have been. If someone knew that they could have capitalized in the past year on there being no updates, the financial incentive to develop a new player would have been higher than it was. Again, I do not think this is malicious on the devs part (or at least I certainly hope not. There isn't much reason for it to be), but this may have been the effect that it had on other devs.

Again, he is also on twitter making jokes about people waiting for the update. He has the time to update here. This is a fact, not speculation.

Another really frustrating thing about this is that the dev seems to be active on twitter (as of two days ago) and trolling people who are asking for updates on there. I understand single dev, I understand the road blocks. The lack of communication is unacceptable, and should not be seen as such. The delays are....troubling, but ultimately fine. But this lack of communication may wind up horrible. For example, what happens if the revamp IS released (after a year of silence and no shared concept work) and....we all hate it? Then what? What if its terrible, and an actual downgrade from V2? Do we wait another year because the vision just didn't end up being the correct one? There is a ready and willing testing community here, and the fact that NO concept art, even a now playing screen or a concept of the menus has been shown....successful devs do not work like this, for the most part. I acknowledge that Poweramp is (by far) the best music player around, and I'm pretty sure that those on here agree. But at this point, I wish it wasn't. There are a lot of "single person" dev teams that share their projects and get feed back in order to make the app as good as possible. Its a shame that they don't have some of the unique things that Poweramp does (the options, etc). I think that there would be a much better chance of Poweramp becoming the player that people want it to be if the dev open sourced it at this point, so that people with the time and the motivation can work on it. Max doesn't have that same motivation anymore, and that's fine. But not acknowledging it is also disingenuous. If you're having creative road blocks, seek help. No redesign, ground up or not, takes this much time if the dev treats it like a full time job (which with the estimated amount of money the app has gained him, I'd bet it is). Taking the money and living the good life is NOT a bad thing, but the way Max is handling all of this is. I think that if Max discontinued/put the project on hiatus, there may actually be a group of people who would work harder at making a successor to it, but with the carrot dangling going on there isn't much incentive to work on a music project when the belief is that a new Poweramp was going to be released for over a year now (as someone else pointed out a few posts back, Max had commented that the UI rework was almost done nearly a year ago). So regardless of if it ended up not working out for him and he had to restart, that's how long the community has been hesitant to start work on a new music player project that would work as a (hopefully money making) successor, and that sucks.

Thought next release was gonna be beta 1 and contain UI stuff. Was that put on hold?? Still, thank you for continuing to update. I'm sure when it does come along it'll be great

Wow. Love everything you've done here and sincerely hope this can be put into work for PA3. Anything close to this level of sophistication and simplicity would make it the best visual experience that any music player on Android can offer

To echo what others have said, I voted for material design but I really just want a different design for the player, and material is a means to that end. The two major overhauls I'd like to see are decreasing the amount of taps needed to get where I need to be, and simplifying menu structure. Decreasing the effort needed to do something is probably paramount, as the time adds up compared to other players. Now, the slide out drawer from the alpha will go some ways to fix this, but the "list" structure of Poweramp as it stands doesn't meet current design needs. For instance, I actually love the now playing screen. I can swipe to go to the next track, hold to go to artist, album, etc in a big, wide space that's easy to hit. The now playing screen is easily the best designed part of the app, and I wish that philosophy of Decreasing time needed to get somewhere would be put to the rest of the app. For instance, why can't I swipe in the library to go from artist to album, song, etc. What other players accomplish in one tap it takes Poweramp three (in most cases) to do, and this is a major shortcoming to me. Having a simple menu bar on top at all times when viewing the library would potentially work. Also, being able to reorder parts of the library would help as well (for instance,I usually use my recently added the most, why can't I move it to the top of the library for easy access). If these options exist, I'm not aware of them (and that would be part of the next point). There are tons of these small productivity tweaks that Material implementation would hopefully take care of, but I'm sure just modernizing the design in any way would also accomplish it. The menu system is a bit confusing and it's hard to find things. Maybe implementing a search button for Poweramp settings (similar to the system settings search put in for lollipop) would solve all this, but so would a more elegant, thought out settings layout.

You're right Andre, the material design can be hit or miss and I'm not sure if it'll work in a media player at all (although Gramophone has the right idea, it's still hampered by the design UI material players all have to go by). I just want the legacy "list" interface to go away. Top tabs that can easily been seen, customized and be used to navigate between things is pretty much universally seen as more attractive (at least as far as I am aware). Artist pictures that are fetched for you. A more attractive artist page (something the Material players get so, so right), dynamically color changing UI. Just updates like that, things that take advantage of the design advances that devs have found in the years since 2.0 came out and the major UI changes were made. Android has seen some major refinements since that time, and I think that Poweramp should make use of it more than it has done in the past

What does suck is that I feel like it will come, but with the application being "under development" in one way or another for over three years like you said, it's just become more of a frustration more than anything. I'm almost sure the update will be very good, and very modern, but at this point I am just hoping that something upcoming (a Shuttle or Gramophone type app) with a more responsive developer will get Poweramp's feature set. Once this happens, it can either just be allowed to fade away, or it would be forced to compete in a major way (with that 3.0 material makeover or something). Poweramp is still the best audio player around, but the UI is just so stagnant and dated....I mean, this summer there will have been two full WINDOWS releases between the last time Poweramp got a major overhaul. Any UI is going to get stale after that long in use, even moreso with a music player that didn't have menu functionality as a strong suit in the first place. Even a preview or anything would be nice, but another thread said that the 3.0 isn't even in ALPHA testing yet, which is an enormous disappointment.

They're still active on Twitter, I just don't think they can find a direction that they want to take the app in. I know personally it's (very) frustrating that this feature hasn't been added, as I have the same view as you do on it. This also seems like an easy change to make, so I really don't know why it hasn't been added. Earlier this week someone posted a new UI they designed for Poweramp, and the team was asking where it came from. I told the guy that they did, and hopefully he got in touch with them to talk about his redesign. So, they're at least thinking about it. Personally, I'm getting too fed up with the lack of updates from the devs on this. When the music player is top of the crop it was one thing, but now you have things like Shuttle out that have a modern UI and a dev who listens and tries to actively participate in putting out newer versions of their app. I'll probably check out Poweramp when it hits 3.0, as whatever update they put out HAS to be great after literal years of waiting. But for right now, I'm just sorta done with it

I think it might just be easier to make this a setting of some sort, and let those who want it change it over (I think I would, but who knows. Hence why having the option to do so would be good)

+1, even getting a response on this issue would be good. ONLY major problem I have with the player right now... (Made a post in a newer topic about the subject, but thought I should bring up the larger topic instead and can't find a delete post button on the other one. Sorry for the double bump though regardless)

Yes please, this. I believe Google Play Music does it as well and would love to have this feature on Poweramp. Right now it's pretty jarring, and most of the other big players seem to have figured out how to implement it (although I don't know if this is a planned feature for version 3 or not...could be)