This release marks the beginning of our transition to a new and overall better user experience. Namely, we've completely rethought how to organize functionalities in the player. The first step was to rethink how audio comments get displayed while an episode plays. This new design replaces our "Campfire" and will allow us, in the very near future, to focus the central part of the player on whatever a show host wants to put forward or display for their listeners in order to "augment" their episode. More on that in a later release note!
We also added some more advanced controls for the player to finish what we had started in the previous release. It took us more time than expected because as we found out the hard way: Mo Controls, Mo Problems. Audio on the web with browser and device diversity is just jolly. Just ask our Engineering team. π°
Go ahead and check out our latest podcast and see who's talking while you listen!
<aside> ππ½ Special Thanks
πJust Gonna Read This
& πThe Obituary Files
for jumping on a call with our Engineers to investigate a hard to replicate bugπSpark My Interest
** for her feedback on our new direction and for reporting a bug with emoji reactions persisting (even though we won't fix it directly as it will get fixed when we release the updated reactions feature in our next cycle)
</aside>We had big hopes for our Campfire idea but we might have gotten a little bit ahead of ourselves. Whoopsies. Turns out we wanted it to solve too many problems at once. So we went back to the drawing board.
Because listening to a podcast is generally a "passive" activity, most listeners won't be actively watching a screen while they listen. Even if they are actively observing the screen, most users want to finish listening to a part of the episode before checking out the comments. When a listener does return their attention to the screen, it takes time β to drop what they are doing, get to their device, unlock it, open the correct app β and the comment may no longer be in focus. The one thing we noticed is a listener will generally have a rough idea of how long ago an episode piqued their interest.
With our new approach to comments, you will see a counter of elapsed comments. When expanded, this counter will display a full list of comments relative to the current playing time in reverse chronological order. We've also grouped and labeled them to give listeners a sense of relative time in order to easily find relevant comments.
It turns out we don't all listen to podcasts at 1x speed! We want to make sure you don't have to change your listening habits too much just to listen to episodes on Uncut. You can now choose your playback speed (1, 1.25, 1.5... all the up way to 2x.) Just don't blaze through these episodes too fast or you'll miss all the good stuff.
Unfortunately, this is not available on Safari desktop. π©
This is small one but since we're not control freaks ourselves, every little bit helps when it comes to giving YOU more control. You can now adjust the volume of your episode independently of your device's volume. The only bummer here is that iOS doesn't allow us to let you switch from whisper to full on blasting π€·π½ (aka it's not available on iOS.)
We just focused on fixing issues we created ourselves when working on new features but that doesn't count. π