The oldest changelog entry describes the overall differences between Aesop Player and its predecessor Homer Player.
I will no longer be making updates or working on Aesop player, but I don't want Aesop to be orphaned if there's someone willing to work on it. If you are willing, please adopt it - take a fork and fix it as needed. (Be sure to look for, and contact the owner of, any forks that already exist.)
This version differs from the Homer Player by Marcin Simonides in a number of ways.
The changes fall into a few groups. The user interface changes were driven by actual use: testing showed that the buttons were too small for some users to see, and some users triggered multi-tap accidentally.
- The user interface is changed so the start/stop buttons are nearly full screen.
- The multi-tap anywhere to enter settings is changed to the gear icon multitap/multi-press.
- More status information is shown on the New Books and Playback screens (for caregivers.)
- Flip to restart.
- Speed and volume setting by dragging or tipping with audio feedback.
A separate group of changes are made for the caregiver in terms of maintaining books and generally supporting the User.
- The ability to add and delete books without using a PC, either from the internet, On-the-go USB media, or removable SD. Change titles and book grouping.
- Explicit planning for remote access to be able to do the above without touching the device.
- Maintenance Mode (and remembering the Kiosk Mode.)
- Make selection of Kiosk mode a radio-button choice rather than bits and pieces.
- Support of Application Pinning and Full Kiosk as distinct modes.
- Ability to set book position anywhere/bulk reset.
- Use audio file metadata where available to provide titles automatically.
Technical changes.
- Increasing the robustness of Simple Kiosk Mode.
- Increasing the robustness of the UI finite state machine in support of face-down-pause / face-up-resume.
- Various bug fixes and (inspection-driven) code cleanup.
- Rework of the motion detector for robustness, flip to restart, and tipping.
- Support for both public and private AudioBooks directories on each physical drive.
Large bodies of the code remain unmodified (or nearly so) from the original.
Fix rare bug, improve logging in samples downloader.
Add two-finger swipe in playback window to move back (or forward) to recent "stop points".
Stop points are created when the player is stopped (or paused). The few closest
to the end of the book are kept, and are always at least one minute apart (duplications ignored).
This allows easy backup should the user fall asleep. More details on the web page.
On Current Books page, don't suggest removing a book that has been completed and then restarted.
Add a High Contrast color theme and switch to enable it. Lots of inspection-related cleanup on the otherwise-changed files, bug fix to PositionEdit when stop list is empty.
Bug fix so that the hint for swiping to change books is visibly displayed. (Don't record that it was displayed until the user actually dismisses it.)
Technical changes to the player and metadata reader to widen the range of books that can be successfully played (and/or title displayed).
When the version changes significantly, notify the user of the existence of the change with a pointer to the web page. The major and minor parts of the version (vx.y) are considered significant. The revision is not involved in the comparison, but if there's a tag part (as from git describe) it does affect things.
The last item in the strings.xml file is a string summarizing the changes (just a short name) that should be updated for each new release.
Web page only: add note about fre:ac for easy ripping.
Fix problem with getting audio tag data to form titles (only affected released versions... proGuard dependency issue.)
Fix problem with hang if the computation of the book size hasn't finished before the book is started.
Fix a number of accessibility issues and some potential crashes shown by automatic testing.
Add a hint on the SECOND time playback is started about the existence of the on-screen volume and speed controls.
Don't do "Button Delay" at startup and when returning from Settings.
Make Simple Kiosk work on Android 10, although it's not recommended because it still is (unfixably) ugly. Make App Pinning more attractive by getting rid of the "Got It" message on Pie and above. Pinning (where available) is the best choice if not using Full Kiosk. Update web page to reflect these changes.
Fix URLs in dialogs to be clickable. Housekeeping in handling the path to the website. Improve error handling if connection to Samples Download website fails.
Fix unzip of books when zip file doesn't contain explicit directory entry. Handle file renumbering when more than 100 files, separate handling of audio files and directories to avoid renumbering unnecessarily.
Keep a history of (unique) directories used as downloads dirs. Access that thru a popup triggered by clicking the DownLoad dir item in the Add Books page. Clicking on a history entry changes directly to that entry. New entries are added from the popup, and entries can be deleted from there by clicking on a delete item entry.
This goes with a web page change on how to install downloadable books from OverDrive and rbDigital and the long path to the directory OverDrive uses for that.
The emulator doesn't behave exactly the same as real hardware when doing Application Pinning for API 21-27. Get the change in 1.1.3 working for working for those APIs.
Fix low-contrast text when Title Edit cannot proceed due to an illegal name.
Minor bugfixes.
Extract a possible title from the directory name (guesswork) if there's nothing better.
Extract a title and author from a .opf file if one is present. Pretty up title extraction logic to make it cleaner. Do a better job of removing book title from chapter titles.
Make unzipping a lot faster by using files instead of streams. Necessary for .opf change when .opf is in a zip file.
Change duration queries to start sooner; allow playback to start while the duration query is in progress - some books have many small files and duration queries can be very long. Change housekeeping details on duration queries to be simpler.
Minor bugfixes. Android Studio 4 gradle and lib updates.
Allow books to be added and deleted (and many other things) via either mail messages or a shared file. This makes it much easier to check on and update the books on a device you can't (easily) touch. Detailed documentation is available at https://donnKey.github.io/aesopPlayer/provisioning.html#remote-downloads. (In beta at the moment.)
Separate Device Owner permission and test for Lock Screen permission. This allows a separate installer with Device Owner to delegate Lock Screen to Aesop while the installer retains Device Owner permission.
That in turn allows for a QR-code installer that installs from the Play Store and sets lock screen permission in Aesop. The installer is "kiosk-installer". Installation can also be done using NFC given an app that is the NFC provider. ("Nfc-provisioning" tentatively.) (Both under DonnKey in GitHub.)
Add a boot entry point in AndroidManifest (etc.) so that if the player is running (not in Maintenance Mode) it will start after a reboot. This applies to all three Kiosk Modes.
Improvements in handling default application setting for Simple Kiosk, and improvements in restarting when pressing the Home Button. Return to a saved root screen (Home application) explicitly in some cases so that the system Home Screen can be Aesop. Simple Kiosk is allowed on Android Q, but it really doesn't work well with the changes on Q. Use Pinning or Full instead.
Add German translations, thanks to @renarena.
Update to conform to API30 constraints. The main AudioBooks directory is read-only to Aesop (but not to the file manager or via a PC); Aesop writes into the Scoped Storage directory ...Android/data/github.io.donnKey.aesopPlayer/files instead. It will play books found in the main AudioBooks directory, but can't change them.
Support headphone buttons: Enable start/stop and volume up/down headphone buttons. Intentionally ignore fast-forward/rewind/next and record buttons as inconsistent with the "simple and fumble-proof" goals of Aesop. Unlike most apps, the buttons wake up the UI.