iPod Touch/iPhone app "FluxTunes" puts a lot of music player control right under your fingers. The general idea is that you can control your Apple touch-screen music player litterally by touch; without taking it out of your pocket.
FluxTunes picks up the mantle of the very helpful jailbreak app "Pocket Touch" by putting the volume, track jump and pause controls intuitively under your fingers. Control the volume by sliding your finger up and down the screen surface. Switch to the next or previous song by flicking right or left. Pause by tapping the screen.
Pocket Touch was insightful and a necessity for the in-pocket-control task -- especially for the first generation of iPod Touch with no volume control buttons. Unfortunately Pocket Touch also required jailbreaking your device which limited is accessibility for most users. Then finally and fatally it got left behind by the iPhone/'Touch 3.x upgrades. Farewell "Pocket Touch" and hello "FluxTunes".
Good news!, FluxTunes isn't a jailbreak app. It's available in the App Store; so everybody can use it. And it runs on the iPhone 3.x software platform. Whew! I'm still using my lovely gen 1 'Touch and need that volume control!
The Gestures
As noted, the basic control gestures -- volume control, pause and track skip -- are left in their intuitive forms: up-down for volume, tap to pause/play, and left/right to go to next or previous track. But FluxTunes takes advantage of the multitouch interface and adds a bunch of new, mostly useful, if not-as-intuitive, gestures.
- Swipe two fingers down; chose from your lists of artists, songs, playlists, podcasts. (Like the music player screens, but without search and without alphabet-jump.)
- Swipe two fingers left or right; jump to the next or the previous playlist in your list.
- Swipe two fingers up; play your entire library.
- Two-finger twist: shuffle select from current playlist
- Swipe three fingers to "skip" forward or back in the current track.
- Tap four fingers to lock/unlock your 'Touch.
The ideas here are nice, and quite workable if the 'Touch or iPhone is, say, clipped onto your belt. But if it's the least be out of the way; like in a pocket or on an arm band, then the three-finger and four-finger gestures get to be a bit awkward.
To do a four-finger tap in your pocket isn't impossible, but with a protective case on the 'Touch, then for the fat-fingered like me its necessary to spend some time hunting for the surface to get all four fingers onto it.
It would be really swell if a setting for FluxTunes let the user choose the gesture. I'd immediately switch the lock to a three-finger tap.
Likewise for the "skip" gestures. This lets you jump forward or backward a set number of seconds on the current track. I've come to use this feature a lot when listening to podcasts. But again, when the 'Pod is in the pocket, two fingers is easier than three. So, if it was possible to pick my gestures, I'd swap to use two fingers left/right for "skip" and move the playlist change with three fingers. That's just my personal preference, but
I am, after all, the user. ;-)
FluxTunes shows the album art while it's playing which is a nice touch, when I'm looking at the device. It's not useful when it's in my pocket, of course, so I'd like to see an option to "run dark". (Maybe assign it to a gesture. Two-finger tap isn't used, yet.) I don't wear my iPod on my shoulder, but I'm not sure I want what I'm listening to announced to the world.
Running dark might help save on battery time too. Have no way to test it, but it seems like that battery runs down quite a bit faster when I'm running FluxTunes. I'm guessing again, but I think that using the backlight is only part of the problem. It may be worth a look by the Quokka team to see if maybe FluxTunes isn't working a little harder than it needs to.
FluxTunes has a few nice features under the covers too. The optional settings are varied and imaginatively helpful. For example, the "skip" feature can be customized in 5 second increments in both directions. By default it comes with the backward skip set to 5 seconds and the forward skip set to 30 seconds. You can change these to any 5 second values that you like. (I have the back-skip set to 20 seconds. Perfect, ImHO.)
I bought my copy of FluxTunes and I'm glad that I did. It works to fill an important functional need and it does it quite well. I'd call it "close to perfect" if it weren't for the the battery usage issue. On the other hand, being able to keep your hands in your pockets when winter is bearing down. I recommend FluxTunes to everyone who'd like to control their iPod without having to pull it out of their pocket.
Thanks for the detailed review. Glad you're enjoying the app.
Regarding your comment on "running dark" in your review, we're not able to allow the screen to blank (and phone to autolock), since that disables touch sensitivity of the screen, effectively disabling app control. If you're OK with that in particular circumstances, then you can manually lock the phone. Music will still play, but you won't have control.
Our testing indicates that battery usage is almost entirely due to the screen being continuously active, since battery usage is very low if you do manually lock the phone with the app running. Manually turning down the backlighting through the phone's brightness setting (we can't change this automatically) might have some effect on battery life, but again our testing indicates that this has minimal effect.
Based on this, currently there's really not much that we can do in the app to improve the battery usage- perhaps future API changes will permit us to turn off the backlighting or something automatically, but that's not available at present. I don't think Apple have considered the possibility that you'd still want touch sensitivity when the screen is not displaying anything (admittedly it wouldn't have been obvious that this would be useful :-) - the hardware may not even be capable of this (or the touch sensing may itself be battery intensive- that would be consistent with the observation that changing the backlighting has little effect).
Daniel,
Thanks very much for clarifying the issues. It could be that the battery life issue is no more than a perception of mine alone. It seems to persist but I'll leave it at "seems" to as I have not measured it as you have.
It's too bad that Apple doesn't permit turning off or turning down the backlight, but its good to know that you've looked into it. (What up with that Apple?)
So; OK. FluxTunes is perfect after all!