Massive Mini Radio Player UWP update round-up

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Just over three months ago I posted about an update to Mini Radio Player UWP, a super application for accessing all forms of online radio, under the one roof. And the updates have been coming thick and fast, with another changelog summary below. I've omitted extra changelog items for the same app for Android, but it's worth noting that this application exists there anyway, should anyone be in the throes of switching platforms?

In the meantime, here's the huge list of what's new and fixed (for Windows 10 Mobile) for the excellent Mini Radio Player UWP in the last month or so then, for v5.7.3, over and above v5.6.6:

  • Fixed pressing play/pause on touch devices always opening the radio dashboard due to a gesture conflict.
  • Fixed being possible for older Premium Account purchase not being validated correctly which could crash the app on some configurations.
  • Improved populating remote lists in settings (countries, regions, favorite categories) to show can't connect to the internet notification when there's no internet connection or the server is not responding.
  • Improved populating remote regions list in settings by deleting them before making a request to avoid user mismatching data on slower internet connections.
  • Improved keyboard navigation by adding enter key to invoke tiles. 
  • Reduced cpu usage by updating the radio dashboard clock only when the content to update is different from the content displayed when the app view is in the foreground. This should slightly improve battery life. 
  • Reduced cpu usage by only updating the seeker object when it's visible while the app is in the foreground. 
  • Improved wireless signal checker to not ever run if a wired connection is detected, fixing an issue where it would run forever if the user did not wait at least 4 seconds on the radio dashboard. 
  • Improved how offline user data is kept. Now offline user data (favorites, bookmarked songs, history) is no longer cleared after signing in letting the user access offline data after signing off. 
  • Fixed opening the radio dashboard on touch devices when entering long press actions to add or manage radios/favorites and pressing any manage button in the player bar. This was due to a swipe up gesture conflict to show the dashboard. 
  • Fixed still saving lists using the old cache system which was using unnecessary IO access and storage space. This should slightly improve battery life and reduce disk wear. 
  • Fixed right to left styles not being applied correctly on some specific viewport sizes. 
  • Fixed app crash when zapping to the last radio or past it on favorites list. 
  • Fixed pinning a radio to start not displaying the radio logo when it is available.  
  • Improved how color schemes are applied at startup. Should be less jarring specially when using dark color schemes. Using dark color schemes looked like a screen flash happened after the splashscreen ended. This should not happen anymore. 
  • Fixed radio dashboard zapping swipe gesture not animating to the correct position on right to left languages after invoking. 
  • Fixed swipe gesture to change tab not invoking with the correct orientation and not animating to the correct position in right to left languages.  
  • Added swipe down gesture and animation to radio dashboard so users can close it quickly. 
  • Added swipe up gesture and animation to player bar so users can open it quickly. Only available after opening a first radio in a session. 
  • Added swipe animation when changing between tabs. The gesture was already available - disabled for now due to performance issues in various devices
  • Added swipe animation when zapping left and right between radios on the radio dashboard.
  • Added gesture and animation settings under advanced tab. Users can disable all swipe gestures and the new touch animations. Defaults are: Windows 10 Mobile = animations disabled by default, Windows PC/Xbox = radio dashboard keyboard/gamepad zapping doesn't use swipe animation, Android 4.4 and older = animations disabled by default. 
  • Added scroll interaction with the now playing labels. Now users on touch devices can swipe left or right on the now playing labels to scroll to any position making it more accessible to check the information and press the buttons. 
  • Improved dashboard zapping swipe when zapping sidebar is open, by scrolling to the radio tile selected. 
  • Changed to not close details panel or twitter card when closing the radio dashboard and going back to it in the same radio. 
  • Changed details panel to a smaller size when zapping sidebar is enabled for better access to the close button on smaller window sizes. 
  • Fixed various scrolling issues with the now playing marquee. 
  • Fixed tab swipe prevention on sliders and toggles in settings panel not working properly on touch devices. 
  • Fixed issue with incremental scrolling populating tiles starting with index 0 again, if the user opened the radio dashboard and went back to the list. This would cause radio mismatch when using dashboard zapping gestures. 
  • Fixed not doing list incremental load when using dashboard zapping swipe. User would need to back out of radio dashboard and force load the list to continue swiping for the next radios (which was partial broken too). 
  • Improved immersive mode by not letting the screen turn off when it is running. 
  • Fixed showing premium expired notification at startup if the user hasn't opened the app after 5 days of subscription being renewed despite Premium being active. The sound of this notification was also removed. 
  • Added partial logo fade-in animation after it is downloaded instead of showing it immediately (except at startup and incremental load due to potential for low framerate). 
  • Slightly improved general UI responsiveness and animation framerate by making the tile template to only have the needed attributes for the local app and by removing data redundancy. 
  • Slightly improved app startup load by optimizing the selection marker rendering time which for some reason was taking longer than the more heavier background brush. This also improves on how the selection marker shows up at startup by not running the animation. 
  • Improved templating function by reducing complexity for faster creation of the lists. 
  • Improved performance when loading settings panel by not loading all objects when opening it. Should now open slightly faster specially on lower end devices. 
  • Improved how settings panel, when opened, is managed when changing window size between phone view and pc view. 
  • Improved label size in radio logo side panel buttons. 
  • Improved when calling incremental load to not run every time near the end of the list. 
  • Various small performance improvements and UI responsiveness across the whole app by accessing dom elements properly. 
  • Improved performance opening general settings tab by using fragments in color schemes and languages object creation. 
  • Updated all fully auto translated languages. 
  • Various code cleanups. 
  • Fixed RNO Now Playing labels not showing anymore (until the next RNO refresh), after the first run, when the user minimizes-maximizes/switches app on Windows or switch between apps on Android. 
  • Fixed some translations in footer note of premium account panel, added missing asterisk and corrected platform description. 
  • Fixed not aligning to the right side, information in details panel when there's just basic info on right-to-left languages. 
  • Fixed app badges not having correct highlight in gamepad/keyboard navigation. 
  • General translation fixes. 
  • Fixed pressing 'try again' in connection not available notification not working properly. 
  • Fixed incremental load not working at all. All groups would be loaded at once causing some delays and low framerate at starting some country lists and downloading all the logos, more noticeable on lower-end devices and slower internet connections.  
  • Fixed not checking properly for addon purchases expiration limit. 
  • Fixed some buttons pressed state not working anymore since a previous change. 
  • Fixed adding favorites in multiple add mode would crash the app and not work at all. 
  • Fixed removing favorites in multiple remove mode would not remove them. 
  • Fixed trying moving favorites to another category would do nothing. 
  • Fixed not saving selected initial view region in Region mode. 
  • Fixed possible app crash when running the list fade in animation.  Improved total data usage reporting by including an average of downloaded data from the buffering process. 
  • Improved auto radio reporting to check if internet connection is available before making the request, to reduce false positives due to intermittent internet connections. 
  • Fixed reporting radio as unavailable, if the user started a radio and stopped it before the first 16 seconds of playback, if Pause Mode profile was set to Stop. 
  • Fixed logos displayed in media controls on Windows 10 and persistent notification on Android never getting the latest version of the logo, if there was an updated one. 
  • Fixed duplicated property on user object causing the whole app to not work on Internet Explorer 11 and possibly on some configurations in more modern browser engines. 
  • Fixed not resetting settings automatically at startup when trying to load them, if they were corrupted, leading to a crashing loop. 
  • Improved reliability on some devices that may have a bad configuration when accessing the WindowsRT API by try catching the errors.  
  • Vastly improved radio logos by reducing their file size at little quality cost. Logos should now display/download quicker on slower/intermittent connections, vastly reduce data usage and take less disk space on user's device. 
  • Fixed non-cached artist images not being displayed since November 2018 due to a breaking change. (Sorry!)

Phew! Quite a fix list and Mini Radio Player is, of course, better and smoother than ever in action:

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The one imperfection that's left here is that the artwork for some stations still seems missing. But the music and the content is here, don't worry!

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I would have liked the extra 'info' pane to go into tech detail, such as bitrate and frequencies, but instead we get website, email and phone no.! Oh well....

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There's a hierarchical music genre picker, which should get you somewhere appropriate very quickly; (right) and there are gazillions of settings and optimisations to fiddle with.

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Not a new feature, but always handy, the YouTube link on the playing bar links you through to a video version of the tune if possible.

You can grab Mini Radio Player UWP in the Store here. Highly recommended and completely free if you need it to be. If you use it on other platforms and/or want to get rid of pop up ads then there's a Premium subscription option - see the notes in the app for what you get if go for this.