Those missing controls…

so, new VLC Remote, new design.

inevitably, there were some decisions to be made about what controls should be there, and how to present them. My goal was to make VLC Remote easy to use, but with powerful features readily accessible.

Or in the wonderful words of Einstein – ‘As simple as possible, but no simpler’

One thing that went was the separate stop and pause buttons. Stop mostly exists from the days of VHS when it mattered whether your movie was stopped (the head stopped spinning against the tape), or paused (the head was spinning, and your tape was wearing out).
With digital media, it doesn’t really matter whether the player is paused. That’s why a lot of players save the space and get rid of it completely.

Having said that – some people like the finality of a stop command which says ‘I’m never coming back to this track!’

At the moment, you can double-tap on the play/pause button to stop. If I get a lot of requests to bring back the stop control as a separate button – I will.

Another thing we got rid of was the separate playlist view – we figured we could just use the playlist in the main display.

The downside of this is that the delete-track controls are kinda hidden. They’re still there – but you have to know what you are looking for.

If you swipe left on any item in the playlist, then you’ll see a delete control for that item. You will also see the ‘delete all’ button at the top left of the screen.
I’ll probably add a tutorial element so that people learn about this. I will also add a delete option to the ‘share’ menu in the next revision. I’m open to suggestions on how to make it more obvious.

I hope this makes sense – you can email me from within the app if you have any comments, or you can post at the forum or on facebook.