Cover art improvements
Recently version 2.17 of libmpdclient was released which adds support for binary responses, like for the ‘albumart’ command that was added to mpd a while ago. Using this new library version Rigelian can now read local cover art without requiring a http server on the player. There are still two major limitations with this approach: It only works with mpd version 0.20.10 and up. Many players are still on older versions.It requires that the artwork file is named cover.jpg or cover.png. Support for this will be in the next Rigelian version, along with some other improvements in the artwork department.
Rigelian on Mac
With macOS Catalina Apple has released catalyst, which makes it possible to port an iPad app to a Mac app with limited effort. A few months ago I had a first look at this, but ran into too many problems. Yesterday I tried again with the latest versions of all frameworks, and was able to get a version running on my Macbook in less than 4 hours. The main issue I ran into is how to make existing subscriptions work on Mac as well.
Start using SF Symbols
In iOS 13 Apple introduced a set of around 1.500 symbols (icon images) which are easy to use in an app. This makes live, at least on iOS 13, easier so I started migrating to these symbols where possible. To keep it backwards compatible, I’m extending UIImage for every image that I migrate: extension UIImage { static var play: UIImage { if #available(iOS 13.0, *) { return UIImage(systemName: “play.fill”)! } else { return UIImage(named: “Play-Small”)! […]