Today I’m releasing the first major update to Soor in a while. If you don’t know what Soor is, it’s an Apple Music app for your iPhone. It was the first ever 3rd party Apple Music client on the App Store, you can read about why I made it here.
Performance
This update concentrates on speed, it’s a major re-write of the app and has tons of under the hood improvements. The app launches about 300% faster and the home screen scrolling will now always be 60fps, even on devices as old as the iPhone 5s.
Brand New Player
The other highlight feature of this update is the brand new player. I spent a lot of time on refining the interactions and I think you’ll love it. The player redesign concentrates on 3 new features:
1. Interactive, Interruptible & Reversible Transitions
The new transition not only animates the artwork image but also the labels and buttons. Every element seamlessly transitions from the mini player to the full player view.
And if you decide to cancel an ongoing transition, you can simply catch it mid way, interrupt and choose to reverse it.
High res version (https://vimeo.com/387943235)
A while back I began to re-create Apple’s multi-state card sheet control (Apple doesn’t actually offer this control but uses it extensively in apps like Maps and Shortcuts) and got hooked onto creating interruptible and reversible transitions. Once you design any interaction with that in mind, you’ll never go back.
Spent a lot more time than I'd like on this but here's my version of Apple's card UI for iOS 11+ devices.
— Tanmay (@tanmays) September 2, 2019
- Card states and offsets are easily customisable.
- Corners animate on pan just like native cards.
(1/2) pic.twitter.com/yEfSu8Oldy
Apple has long been suggesting devs to take advantage of the new APIs introduced since iOS 10 and make every interactive animation fully interruptible and reversible. The new player makes use of UIPropertyViewAnimator to make this happen. If you are a developer and interested in re-creating something like this., please check out this WWDC 2017 video on advanced animations.
2. Cover Flow
Cover Flow was an iconic feature of the iOS 6-era Music app. It was a highly requested feature and I wanted to bring it back in some form — different enough so as not to upset Apple.
Soor now has a brand new card based layout for browsing through your queue, if you missed cover flow you’re going to enjoy this.
3. Artwork based visualizer
The background in player screen is now a gradient of colors from the current artwork, gracefully animating between the various colors in the artwork. It sure looks beautiful.
Download
Soor v1.5 is now available to download from the App Store.