Makes No Sense At All

The next version of iPhone is coming along well, bringing some new features I’m sure you like:

• Improved controls for changing the volume, moving through songs
• Seek in a song
• Amazon based cover art
• Configure multiple connections.

I hope I can finish everything in the next 3 weeks and bring it to the AppStore.

Oh, and one more thing… you can now enjoy your music directly on your iPhone whereever you are. A connection can be configured to run in traditional remote mode, or in on-the-go mode where the iPhone picks up the MPD stream (you need to add an icecast server to your setup, and run mpd 0.14 because the iPhone only supports mp3 format streaming, nog ogg). Tests under 3G and WiFi have been working very well, only downside is that it’s draining the battery rapidly.

Version 1.2.1 of MPoD is available in the AppStore. This version improves a connectivity issue when MPoD is running and the iPhone goes to sleep, and it fixes a crash that occurred frequently when clicking a song in the Now Playing list.
There is no new functionality in this version.

For a great start of 2009, version 1.2 of MPoD is available in the AppStore. The main change in this version is on the inside, where a local database is implemented that caches the information from your MPD server. This results in a major improvement of the startup time, which for my 10K song library goes from 18 seconds down to about 3-4 seconds. Furthermore the main screen should be more responsive now.

In addition to this some smaller functional changes have been included as well:

• Shaking your device while you’re in the now playing screen will activate one of the random modes (random album, or a number of random songs)
• The active playlist includes the artist for each song in case the playlist contains songs by different artists
• On the artist, album and song tabs you can immediately toggle between ‘add mode’ and ‘replace mode’. The ‘add mode’ will add the selected item to the active playlist, whereas the ‘replace mode’ will replace the active playlist contents with the selected item.

Like Snow Leopard, the next release of MPoD will focus on performance rather then on functionality. Allthough the startup performance was improved a lot in version 1.1, it still takes a long time before the lists of artists, albums and songs are available. For my own 10.000 song library it takes about 15-20 seconds.

By using a locally cached sqlite3 database in combination with lazy loading, the loading now takes about 3 seconds, which is really a massive improvement. In the coming week additional testing will be done, and I hope that this release can be available in the AppStore in 2 weeks from now.