Work on Canorum has been slow going lately due to a sprained wrist. I have managed to complete another section of work for the 0.2.0 beta release however: the genre browser. Right now the layout is near identical to the artist and album browsers, but that will likely be changed after the next beta release. The genre browser also includes a (broken) word cloud indicating the relative number of tracks available for each genre.
Since I couldn’t find a good source of generic (free) genre art online, I decided to take a page from the Google Play Music app, and dynamically generate a genre image from the albums and artist artwork. The generated image will variably show 1-4 album or artist images (depending on what is available). Some of the generated images still look a bit busy, so I may switch to using a layout more similar to the Google Play Music app.
The genre detail page is mostly a placehoder. It does correctly load the genre image, detail text from Wikipedia, and a list of tracks, but the layout needs to be updated to group by artist, or at least by album. This is next on the TODO list.
Part of building the genre browser including unifying the bitmap cache for the three browsers, so there was a significant reduction in memory requirements: idling around 80M from 120M. There is still some work left to do reducing the cost of using so many bitmaps, but I’m loath to reduce the quality any further. Having a page full of high quality album art and artist promo images is very pleasing to look at.
More work has been done fixing bugs, and only a few remain until the build is stable enough for a new release. Hopefully I’ll have that out the door within a week.
