Language content downloading

[Samuel Bradshaw]

On the Book of Mormon app for iPhone they combine choosing a language and downloading a language into the same menu. Has it been considered to do something similar in the LDS Music app? Right now we have three different menus with languages – "Languages" on the collections screen, "Downloads" on the tab bar, and the menu you use to switch languages while you're viewing a song. I think we could simplify the user experience by appending "Downloads" to the "Languages" menu...

[Hilton Campbell]

Can you mock up what that would look and work like? I'm a little concerned about having a list of languages that you can choose, and then a list of languages that you can change download settings for. When the list of languages gets longer, no one will ever see the list of language download settings. But then, that might be ideal, no one should ever need to see the Download settings :).

On Jan 21, 2013, at 6:18 PM, Samuel Bradshaw <samuel.h...@gmail.com>

 wrote:

On the Book of Mormon app for iPhone they combine choosing a language and downloading a language into the same menu. Has it been considered to do something similar in the LDS Music app? Right now we have three different menus with languages – "Languages" on the collections screen, "Downloads" on the tab bar, and the menu you use to switch languages while you're viewing a song. I think we could simplify the user experience by appending "Downloads" to the "Languages" menu...

NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

[Samuel Bradshaw]

Here's a mockup of the modified Languages menu. The downloads list won't be too far down unless the user has already downloaded several languages. I might be a little confused about what the download settings do, as they are now...

This is how I envision it: when the app is first installed, it only has one or two languages. All of the content for those languages – words, sheet music, and audio – are included in the install. Then, if they want to access other languages, they press the corresponding download button, which downloads all the content for that language.

Also, because we are putting cross-reference data into the app, we can eliminate overlap in the instrumental audio downloads. The instrumental track for, for example, "The Morning Breaks," is the same in other languages. There are a few exceptions to this, where the rhythm of a song is different (like the French "Angels We Have Heard on High"). We can just check the track length to make sure it's the same recording, and mark it if it's not... but the church hasn't done many language-unique recordings yet.

---------------------
Samuel Bradshaw

http://singpraises.net/

---------------------

[Diane R. Bastian]

The only language-unique recordings of the hymns besides English is Spanish.  The International Children’s Songbook, however, has been done in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, German, Italian, and Dutch.  Except for those songs unique to an international book, however, we have used the English music tracks as accompaniment.  The only difference would be what is sung.  For the unique pieces a piano track was recorded and used.

 

Diane R. Bastian

--
 
 

[Hilton Campbell]

This mockup looks really, really nice.

The main difficulty is that you don't need to download a language to use it. If you don't choose a language for offline access ("download"), the app will download mp3s on demand. But if you enable offline access, it will download all the mp3s in the background and keep them around so you can use it offline.

Given that model, the UI you mocked up would have all the languages in the first list, and then again in the second list. Unlike the Book of Mormon app, where each language appears in only one of the two lists.

We might be able to change how downloads work though.

On Jan 23, 2013, at 11:50 PM, Samuel Bradshaw <samuel.h...@gmail.com> wrote:

Here's a mockup of the modified Languages menu. The downloads list won't be too far down unless the user has already downloaded several languages. I might be a little confused about what the download settings do, as they are now...

This is how I envision it: when the app is first installed, it only has one or two languages. All of the content for those languages – words, sheet music, and audio – are included in the install. Then, if they want to access other languages, they press the corresponding download button, which downloads all the content for that language.

Also, because we are putting cross-reference data into the app, we can eliminate overlap in the instrumental audio downloads. The instrumental track for, for example, "The Morning Breaks," is the same in other languages. There are a few exceptions to this, where the rhythm of a song is different (like the French "Angels We Have Heard on High"). We can just check the track length to make sure it's the same recording, and mark it if it's not... but the church hasn't done many language-unique recordings yet.

<LDSMusicLanguages.jpeg>

On Jan 22, 2013, at 12:10 PM, Hilton Campbell <hil...@ldschurch.org> wrote:

Can you mock up what that would look and work like? I'm a little concerned about having a list of languages that you can choose, and then a list of languages that you can change download settings for. When the list of languages gets longer, no one will ever see the list of language download settings. But then, that might be ideal, no one should ever need to see the Download settings :).

On Jan 21, 2013, at 6:18 PM, Samuel Bradshaw <samuel.h...@gmail.com>

 wrote:

On the Book of Mormon app for iPhone they combine choosing a language and downloading a language into the same menu. Has it been considered to do something similar in the LDS Music app? Right now we have three different menus with languages – "Languages" on the collections screen, "Downloads" on the tab bar, and the menu you use to switch languages while you're viewing a song. I think we could simplify the user experience by appending "Downloads" to the "Languages" menu...

NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

---------------------
Samuel Bradshaw

http://singpraises.net/

---------------------

--
 
 

[Justin Wagner]

Agreed, I like the idea and the mockup, it looks very nice.

I think we should keep the way the app handles downloading content the same, (i.e. all languages can be accessed and each item is downloaded when you try to access it if not cached already) and go with a combined language picker/offline content manager.

I am imagining having a TableView that displays all of the languages (just like our current language picker) however put the "on/off" download for offline access control that is buried in the download view into that same view.  (I really should have a mockup image to show this, but I'm being lazy and over describing with words instead)

So clicking on the language cell will swap the language you are viewing, and clicking on the "on/off" button in that cell will enable/disable offline access to that languages content.

The only tweaks that would need to be made are:

  - how to signify which language is currently selected (presently this is displayed with a check mark in the place that we would put the on/off control)

  - come up with a way of easily describing this "advanced" functionality

  - Possibly put all the languages with offline access enabled at the top of the list to make it quicker to select them

I think combining these two views is a good idea, we just need to iterate until we come up with a good UI to make it happen.

--
 
 

[Samuel Bradshaw]

The Wifi settings menu might be similar to what we need. The checkmark is on the left, and there's a specific-item settings control on the right.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/06/iphone-ui-gallery-137.jpg

Is the download settings only for mp3s; i.e. will sheet music in all languages automatically ship with the app?

Does the cache for not-always-offline languages empty itself after a certain amount of time?