Reply to post: Re: It will be their podcasts next...

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: It will be their podcasts next...

"And they turned off the iPlayer Radio app a few days ago"

Not *quite*. On my old Android 4 tablet (which, barring a change of heart from the developers, will therefore never be able to experience the "delights" of the Sounds app), iPlayer Radio did start going no further on startup than the splash screen which said it *has now been replaced by* Sounds. However, based on some of the recent iPR review comments added to the play store by fellow disgruntled Sounds-phobes, it appears that simply uninstalling and reinstalling the iPR app is sufficient to give it a much needed stay of execution, with it reverting to showing the *will be replaced by* splash screen we've come to know and hate over recent months... For how much longer iPR will continue to work is anyone's guess, but as of right now it's still working just fine on the phone sat beside me as I type this.

"The iPlayer Radio app had a dark theme, the Sounds app is eyeball-burning bright."

The lack of a dark theme (essential for me given how much radio listening I do at night), combined with the smaller/thinner typeface used for all the programme details, makes using Sounds a genuine pain in the eyeballs for me. But sadly, this just seems to be the way of the world - a fresh faced team of new energetic developers, led by some manager with an ego the side of a planet, decide to reinvent the wheel in an attempt to attract new users, and in doing so they manage to alienate a sizeable chunk of their existing userbase by making changes which verge from the merely confusing all the way through to the openly user-hostile (*), and then sticking their fingers in their ears going "la la la, I can't hear you" whenever any slightly less than entirely positive reviews of their creation start to roll in.

(*) as someone's who's had to cope with dodgy colour vision since birth, and who's now also of an age where natural ageing is starting to take its toll, I have a particular dislike for any UI designer who chooses to create something which is obviously at odds with the wealth of freely available information explaining exactly why certain combinations of colours, certain sizes of typefaces etc. etc. are A Bad, Very Very Bad, Don't Even Think About Doing It If You're Not A Complete Idiot, Thing and should therefore not be used if you want your UI to be accessible. There simply is no excuse for getting it as badly wrong as so many UIs these days manage to achieve, and IMO part of the blame has to lie squarely at the feet of whichever idiot originally came up with the whole "let's make the UI as sparse as possible, with minimalistic visual cues on a pure white background, oh so clean looking, isn't it just heavenly, how can anyone think this is anything less than graphic design perfection in pixel form" idea now embraced pretty much wholeheartedly by Microsoft, Google and anyone else who thinks they have to create a lookalike UI in order to be considered hip and modern.

But that's a whole other rant for another day. Getting back to the Sounds app UI, I can summarise it in one word. Yuck. Too bright, difficult to read, and too much wasted space requiring more scrolling or too-ing and fro-ing from one screen to another to find the stuff you want. The iPR UI might not have been in the running for any "most beautiful looking UI of the 21st century" awards, but in certainly was a thing of beauty in terms of being a functional and useable UI.

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