App Preview: Koto Player
Recently you may have seen several tweets around the community that looked a little something like this:
wusaint Ryan St. Andrie
#NowPlaying 16-The Grits – Ohh Ahh by The Grits on #KotoPlayerfor webOS!1 minute ago Favorite Reply Delete
The big question many of you have is “What is Koto Player?” Funny you should ask! Turns out we got a little preview of this cool music player. So sit back and enjoy the screencaps and details… because putting it bluntly, you’re going to wanna buy this sucker as soon as it becomes available.
Let’s get the bad news out of the way: Koto Player is only available for webOS 2.0 and up. That means it won’t be available until Palm allows apps to set their minimum webOS version to 2.0. Before any of you cry foul, just know that a lot of the cool stuff this music player can do is just not possible on anything less than 2.0.
Back to the cool stuff. Our good friend Will Honey (Tibfib) built this app from scratch. From scratch. This is not based on the stock music app what so ever. Some of the images are borrowed from the stock music app but rest assured all of the code is Will’s.
Koto allows you to control your music from nearly every scene with a mini controller at the bottom of the screen. The ^ arrow reveals a progress bar so users can scrub through a song without needing to go to a “Now Playing” screen. If you do want to do that a simple tap of the headset icon will take you to the now playing page.
The “…” options button in the upper right will bring up the “Play All” and “Shuffle All” options if viewing an album or playlist. In other scenarios this button will allow you the ability to save all songs to a playlist, pull up lyrics, tweet the song you are playing, and more.
While using this app I quickly realized how awesome having a mini controller for my music in every screen really was. No matter where you are in the app, you always have complete control over what is currently playing. The concept was suddenly so obvious to me I’m surprised most other players haven’t incorporated this. It’s just that much quicker and easier.
Koto Player doesn’t skimp on common playlist features seen on other players, and like many good players, you can easily add, delete, or reorder your songs within a playlist. A nifty pop-up allows you to navigate through your playlist quite effortlessly, all while never losing control of what you are currently listening to.
Probably one of my favorite features of this app has to be the “Continue with Album” option. Say you are listening to a huge playlist that contains several different artists and albums. You hit a song from a particular album and you want to listen to that album instead of the playlist you are currently on. Simply tap on the the “…” button, select “Continue With Album” and you will be taken to the album instead. This all happens seamlessly without ever breaking the progress of the current song.
Album view also contains a neat little trick that will come natural to all webOS users. When you swipe up on the album art on the now playing page, it zooms out to an album art “card view,” if you will. This is a horizontal scroller, so you can swipe to check out the upcoming or previous songs. Swipe down on a song in card view, and it will play that song. Swipe up, and it will be removed from the playlist. This is a feature that really comes in handy if you want to make spur of the moment changes to your playlist.
Of course Koto Player supports Just Type in webOS 2.0. Simply type in the name of a song or artist and Just Type will bring you results. Tapping on a song or playlist will open up Koto to play the song while tapping on an artist or album will show all the songs for each. (This is just another testament to how cool Just Type will be when developers make use of it.)
Right now Koto Player it is in closed beta but it won’t be long until it is available to the masses. Will says:
“I have a few major features in the works, but I’m not going to announce them yet.”
Well Will, if those features are anything like what you have showed us so far, we are sure it will blow us away! If our readers would like to keep up with the progress of this app please follow @Koto_Player on Twitter or visit KotoPlayer.com. We will also keep our readers posted on all news involving Koto Player.
