BlueSound make a range of Hi-Fi components, including the "Node 2" a streamer [internet radio, local mp3s,flacs etc from a NAS, network share etc], with analog and digital outputs, and an controller app for many platforms (Win, OSX, Android, iOS). I recently replaced my Logitech Squeezebox with one of these. The node 2 itself runs a stripped down linux
The OSX app, which is the one i'm most intersted is clearly the poor cousin to the mobile apps, and in particular has 2 serious issues for me
- When showing more than a few albums cover art, loading performance for these is terriable, making "a scan artwork to pick an album to play" type experience poor.
- There's an Albums view, and an artists view, but no albums by artists view [ala iTunes].
With small libraries these probably aren't big deals, but for larger libraries, and plenty of screen realestate they turn what could be a great user experience into frustration.
BluShepherd is an exploration by me to see if its possible to build a companion app that solves these 2 issues.
The Node exposes a HTTP based API, details of my exploration of that are in api.md
Well, made some decent progress, have a albums by artist view, with some amount of caching of the covers. [but NSURLCache is weird].
