Today latest version of AntennaPod (3.10.2) arrived.
Folders are gone on the Subscriptions tab and are replaced by tabs per Tag. Not bad…
But why are those Tag-tabs located at the top of the page so you have to use two hands to switch tab or - better - why it is not possible to swipe left/right to switch tab?
I would prefer swipe on the bottom bar switches section and swipe in the subscriptions main body switches tab (tag).
And please add these tabs on the Inbox and Episodes section too.
Don’t like the way you have to scroll across the tag-tabs to see them all. I only have two defined but still need to scroll to see the second.
Would also like the option to only see the tag-tabs and suppress the display of individual subscriptions as it was before. In fact would like to see the tags displayed as before at the top of the listed subscriptions. A clunky backward step in my view.
And where has the Download screen gone from the list of default opening screens?
That’s one of the main reasons for the change. Preparing for other screens to support tags in the future. For episodes screens, the tags being inside the list doesn’t really work, so we had to change the way tags work
Really? Worked just perfectly for me the way it was. This new way is a mess. For one thing you can no longer see if there are any new episodes for a particular subset of tagged subscriptions at a glance which I commonly want to do for my sports tagged subscriptions as a heads up to avoid spoilers.
I thought my groups disappeared, as they were no longer at the bottom of the Subscriptions. Then I saw the, whatever you call it, pill roll just a bit down from the top. Ahh, there they are.
I always like getting a new AntennaPod. Thanks devs/team!
Agree strongly enough to make an account here and comment.
This horizontally-scrolling, tiny-list GUI element has been popping up all over Android apps the last few months, and driving me absolutely batty anywhere it does.
I have maybe a half-dozen tags, and I deliberately removed each podcast from the “All” view in Subscriptions, so that podcasts would only show up when I clicked each tag. Now there’s an “All” view I can’t get rid of by telling each podcast to only show up within a tag, and no way to see all my tags (and just the tags) on screen at once and choose between them.
Good to have tags everywhere, but I literally can’t see myself using tags on each screen if they are presented in this tiny, horizontally-scrolling list. The tap area for it is tiny, and scrolling back and forth horizontally means my finger is directly in the way of what I’m trying to view as I scroll.
In one sense, I know I’m using tags as categories, which is probably not their intended use. In another, though, this horizontally scrolling GUI element is very frustrating to actually use.
I have also created an account just to comment on the tags feature.
I don’t like the new changes. I liked the previous interface more.
I had a system where I used tags to organize and tidy up the list of podcasts. I liked that any untagged podcasts appeared first and any tagged ones appeared at the end. Each tag acted like a folder. I could create a tag like “career”, tag a bunch of podcasts and then hide them from the main view. I was interested only in the total number of career related podcasts. And I only listened to them at particular times, so it was an easy way to not let them get in the way.
I liked how the previous system allowed me to get an overview of my podcasts better. Basically, I could take a quick glance and see:
Any untagged podcasts appeared first. Any untagged podcasts with unlistened episodes showed first.
I could check any tagged podcasts and see the number of new episodes, e.g, I could tell that there were 7 episodes in “career” tag, 10 episodes in “education” tag and 100+ episodes in a “experimental” tag (which only contained one podcast with many episodes and I didn’t want it to always appear as the first podcast in the list because I wasn’t invested in it and I was just trying it out).
So, overall, AntennaPod is a great application and I love using it. However, I really wish I could get the previous view back because the new one is basically useless to me. It is not possible to get an overview anymore and see which tags have how many episodes. I can either list “All” option and see an overwhelming number of podcasts, not being able to organize them in any way. Or I need to click on every tag separately and check what’s inside.
So, please consider adding an option to list things the old way. This would really be great.
Thanks everyone for chipping in with your thoughts. It’s very nice to get such feedback, even if it’s critical (but constructive).
I must admit that I’m not a fan of current implementation either (even though I pushed for changing away from the previous approach). As folks have said: lots of scrolling, not possible to see everything at once, and small touch areas.
That said, I also want to set expectations straight: it’s unlikely we’ll go back to the old system, and we’ll certainly not add an option for this. We changed for a reason: the old system was bulky (ugly) and couldn’t be implemented on other places in the app (the inbox, for example).
So, let’s focus on a) what the needs are that are currently not met and b) how we can change the UX/UI so we address those needs.
From what I read above, we could describe the needs as such:
Ability to see all tags at once.
Underlaying reason: having an overview of the available tags without much fiddling with fingers blocking the view of your content.
Ability to suppress the display of individual subscriptions from the ‘All’ view.
Underlaying reason: someone mentioned ‘cleaning’ the UI, but that doesn’t really make much sense to me, for a screen that is intended to display subscriptions. I can’t think of any other underlying reason. Why would you want to do this?
Ability to see if there are any new episodes for a particular subset of tagged subscriptions at a glance.
Underlaying reason: quickly starting of queuing episodes with a specific tag (or not do so, in case of sports results), without having to open/check each tag.
Ability to see how many podcasts are included in a tag. (This is based on @bankbook_coaster’s “I was interested only in the total number of career related podcasts.” But I’m not sure I’ve interpreted this one correctly.)
Underlying reason: it’s nice to know which tags are most ‘popular’ for you.
Ability to see untagged podcasts at a glance.
Underlying reason: being able to see which podcasts haven’t been organised yet applying tags to them still.
Before delving into the (possible) solutions, any comments on these identified needs? Once established/confirmed, we can investigate/brainstorm/discuss what can and needs to be done to reach these goals.
(@Matth78 tagging you here too as I guess you might have some input for this too.)
My tags are: “Arts & Leisure”, “Culture & Politics”, “Interviews & Personas”, “Language Learning”, “Reporting & Stories”, “Tabletop Games”, and finally “Technology”. As mentioned above, I am basically using tags as categories. I subscribe to between 50 and 100 podcasts at any given time, and I don’t try to ‘keep up’ with all of them. For me, it’s more about have a broad, navigable selection of stuff available for listening. I almost never look my whole list of subscriptions because:
I always add one or more of the above tags to a podcast when I first subscribe to it.
The full list (“All”) is intentionally longer than I want to scroll looking for things to enqueue.
At any given time, I’ll probably want to listen to something within one of those topical tags.
When I’m deciding which podcast episodes to download and/or enqueue, my process looks like:
What kind of podcast do I want to listen to?
What podcasts do I have like that?
Do those podcastss have new episodes that look interesting?
So I pick a tag I’m interested in listening to right now, and see which podcasts in that tag have new episodes I want to download and/or enqueue. That is my principal method for navigating among podcasts and choosing new episodes. Previously, suppressing tagged podcasts from the “All” Subscriptions view such that they only showed up in specific tag views was conducive to that mode of browsing.
Ultimately, having an “All” option in the UI element for “list of tags” reused across the app does make sense, I would just personally not use it. Having an “Untagged” option in the same list of tags also makes sense. The new list of tags is really a filtering tool which it is incidentally possible to use as one level of categorical hierarchy, and both “All” and “Untagged” are useful as filters.
It will be great to have the tag list in the other drawers in the future, as the above process/flow is something I’d appreciate being able to replicate in, for example, the Downloads drawer.
I think a minimal change that would be maximally helpful could be a toggle for the list of tags to wrap at the screen edge instead of side-scrolling, so all a user’s tags show up at once in multiple rows at the top of a drawer view. This is based on my assumption that the new tag list will be appearing in future releases at the top of more drawer views.
I can see how that would immediately introduce design questions like:
Is wrap-vs-scroll-tags per drawer or global?
Is wrap-vs-scroll-tags persistent across app restarts?
Given answers to those questions, where does the actual toggle live in the app?
For me personally, it seems optimal to have such a toggle at the end of the tag list, embedded into the tag-view UI element (that will soon be reused across drawers), and have the toggle be persistent per drawer to whatever the user last set in that drawer. But I also understand every option is another feature that needs maintaining.
