Stellody v0.6.0

Release notes

Rate what you are listening to

Any track takes a rating out of five stars, from a rectangle at the right of the
position bar. The stars are about whichever track you have picked out rather
than whichever one is playing, so a track you have never heard can be rated; so can one you
point at while something else plays. Pressing the star a track
already sits on takes the rating back, since nought is the absence of a rating
rather than a sixth one.

An album carries a rating of its own, set from the stars in its own header under
the artist's name. A caption says which rating it is, because the two controls
look alike and sit inches apart. Neither is worked out from the other: a record
with one poor track on it is not a poor record.

Neither ever reaches your music files. Both are kept in Stellody's own store
against the album's identity rather than against a path, so renaming a folder
loses nothing.

Play counts, where they can actually be read

Reaching the end of a track is what counts as a play, so skipping through an
album counts nothing.

The count first sat beside the stars on the position row. That row is about one
track and moves on the moment that track ends, which is the moment the count
becomes worth reading, so in practice it showed nothing. It now sits on the
track's own row in the album's list, beside the rest of its detail, which lets a
record be read down for the tracks you keep coming back to. A track that has
never played out says nothing there rather than nought: a column of noughts says
only that the library is new.

The album pane's header

The play and close buttons sat beside the album's name, so the name stopped
short of the edge to leave room for two small pictures. They sit under it now,
at the end of the rating row, at twice the size they were. The name runs the
whole width.

The play button also stopped disagreeing with the one on the toolbar. It offered
to start the open album whatever was already going; it wears the pause face
while something plays now and pauses on a press, which is what the toolbar's
button has always done. Both are told what is playing from the same place, so
they cannot drift apart.

The album header reads properly

The name, the artist and the album rating caption each sat with the first
letter against the corner of a hard box. Every widget carries its own fill, so
a label in that header reads as a rectangle whether or not it was meant to.
Those three now hold their text off the edges and carry rounded corners: the
title and the artist round on the outside of the pair, since they read as one
block and rounding each in full would pinch the join between them.

A cross rather than a slash

The mark that says a switch is off is new artwork: a red cross. It reads the
same way in both places it is used, over the muted speaker and on the button
that rolls an open album back up.

Help, plus knowing when there is a newer Stellody

The About button at the right of the top tray is a Help button now. Its tooltip
says Help and it drops a menu carrying About and Check for updates. The menu
bar's Help menu carries both as well.

Stellody can now tell you when a newer version has been published. About three
seconds after the window opens, then once a day after that, it asks GitHub
whether there is one. It says nothing at all unless there is: no "you are up to
date" you did not ask for. When there is, it offers the file for your own
machine, a way to skip that version for good, else Later. Asked outright from
the Help menu it answers whichever way it turns out, including that it could not
reach GitHub.

That request carries nothing whatever about you or your machine, not even which
version you are running: it reads one small public document about Stellody and
the comparison happens here. Scanning a library and playing it still open no
connection at all.

This is the second thing in Stellody that can open a connection, the cover
chooser being the first, so the structural test that has always held the
local-first promise now names two modules instead of one and says what each is
for. Going from one to two was an edit somebody had to make and defend, which is
the point of counting them.

Waving the close question away decides nothing

Pressing the cross on the prompt that asks what the close button should mean
used to minimise the window to the tray. The prompt reported the offered
default whether or not anybody had chosen it, so being dismissed looked exactly
like choosing Minimise to tray.

It decides nothing now. The cross on it, like Escape, takes the whole press back:
the window neither leaves nor hides. Nothing is remembered either, which
matters because the same fault had a quieter half: dismissing the prompt with
the remember box ticked wrote that non-answer down as the standing behaviour,
so the question never came back.

Stellody has a site

At stellody.co.uk, with a home page, a features
page, a page on why it is built this way and a download page. It carries
screenshots of both views and states the things Stellody deliberately does not
do as plainly as the things it does.

The same pages answer at stellody.com, which now reaches the product rather
than the placeholder that stood there before. stellody.co.uk is the address
worth linking to; every page says so in its own markup, so a search engine is
never left to choose between the two.