V5.4 is now live, with the most important change being that artwork displayed on your Echo's Screen is now *persistent*. Every 6 seconds, the Echo polls the skill for an update of the artwork/metadata, increasing to every 2 seconds in the last 6 seconds of a now-playing track so as not to miss the transition.
This means that the *progress bar* is no longer static but now increments from 0 to 100% as a track progresses (if you use the *seek* command backwards then it will regress accordingly). Changing the playlist from another controller like iPeng or Material means it will take max. 6 seconds for the Echo Screen to follow suit. In theory, all MediaServer screens revert to the now-playing screen again after a max of 24 seconds. The persistence has the (desirable) side-effect of keeping the Echo *in-session* until you say "Alexa, exit". This means that you no longer have to say "ask MediaServer to..." after the first command issued :cool:. I call this *Appliance Mode* because it effectively *turns your Echo into a dedicated appliance for controlling LMS*. Incidentally, you can disable it by saying "Disable artwork display" because a side-effect is that you cannot use Alexa for 'other' tasks while she's in a permanent MediaServer session without first exiting MediaServer. Because all this is rather heavy on my back-end (which has to proxy the coverart image from your password-protected ngrok endpoint to a public endpoint for Amazon to retrieve), the persistence is only available to subscribers. There's also a new custom APL template for showing textual feedback, where the font-size is responsive both to your Echo's display size and the amount of text to be displayed. The length of time for which this screen persists before either disappearing back to your Echo's home screen or reverting to the now-playing screen is also dependent on the length of the text (so you have enough time to read it). If the text is associated with an error message, the screen background is RED to get your attention. Finally, the bottom of the Echo's screen will continually show a revolving *hint-list* with commands you can try. Almost all MediaServer users never use more than about 5-10 commands, despite there being 122 available :confused:. Hopefully, this will encourage more experimentation. Enjoy ! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ philchillbill's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=68920 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=111016 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list plugins@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/plugins
