Saturday, November 18, 2017

a hack to avoid iOS music app's odd decision to play the first thing that comes to mind...

I try to be forgiving of UI/UX decisions that seem foolish to me, understanding that sometimes there are design constraints I might not be aware of that are driving the show.

One longstanding iOS annoyance/oddity is this: when a podcast or audiobook ends, control tends to revert back to the music app, which makes sense, but then the music app starts playing songs from its library, starting at the top, alphabetically.

I suppose that's better than playing from all songs on shuffle, since at least I got to recognize that the Jackson's Five "A.B.C." meant it was time to switch gears, but for me it's worse than say, picking up where I left off, playlist-wise. Or better yet - why play anything? Is silence so awful? Would people assume the chain from device to speaker has somehow busted if there's nothing but quiet?

So, a small hack - moviesoundclips.net has a page of clips from Aliens, I took "That's it, man. Game over, man, game over!", padded it to be that plus four minutes of silence, called it "a a a - game over man" and then made an mp3 of the result. A little playlist hackery to make sure it had a spot on my phone and I was set - now when podcasts ends I should hear that, rather than the Jackson 5 (don't get be wrong, it's a great song, but kind of loud...)

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