Play/Pause icons on episode image

Feature request
1

I wwitched to AntennaPod a few weeks ago. Much prefer it to my previous podcast app.

Then a few days ago discovered by accident that when you are playing an episode you can use the episode image as a play/pause toggle.

This is a great feature because 80% of the time I’m pressing play or pause and I don’t have to be as accurate, especially when walking/moving, in pressing the play/pause button on the bottom playback controls.

What would be great is for this feature to be made more obvious, as it’s possible I might never have found it.

A suggested solution would be an option named something like ‘display play/pause button on episode image’ which does exactly what it says.

Thanks for listening and for a great podcast app

2

Welcome to the AntennaPod family, and thanks for sharing what you discovered about clicking on the episode image to play/pause.

1 Like
3

Good to know this feature exists, I also had no idea about it until reading this thread. Having an option to make it more visible sounds like a practical improvement. It’s little things like this that can help with usability, especially when on the move.

2 Likes
4

Other apps do similar but have a larger Play icon overlaying the podcast art. Depending on the podcast art the Play icon can be difficult to make out but over time the user learns that it is there.

5

How about it’s there by default - so new users instantly know about that feature - but it’s an option you can turn off if you want an uncovered image. Win-win?

6

Adding new settings is almost always a bad idea. See this blog post, for example: Tech Notes: Why not add an option for that?

7

If not an settings option then what would you suggest to highlight this feature?
At the moment it’s a great feature that is effectively hidden.

8

It might make sense to note this feature in the documentation

1 Like
9

Is it technically possible to dynamically have a Play icon with a strongly contrasting colour to that used in the artwork for the podcast currently playing? Even if it is just to select between white for dark artwork and black for light artwork?

10

My suggestion would be to keep it simple and just have a white play/pause icon as per the current playback controls. The odds of a completely white podcast artwork that made the play/pause button hidden by the artwork are very low. And even if that were the case, surely the user would have at least one podcast in their library that wasn’t completely white so they will see/find this feature.

The reason I suggested it be a Settings->option is that once a user knows about this functionality they can then disable it to just see the artwork (no play/pause button overlay) if they think that is more aesthetically pleasing to them.

But this way all new users would know about this extremely useful functionality.

p.s. I think the adding it to the documentation as mentioned above is not a good solution as probably a tiny percentage of users would read that documentation.

1 Like
11

Especially for episodes with episode-specific covers or even with chapter images, we should not overlay things over the cover