Cloudtape now has a full-screen album sleeve. Tap the art in the player and it fills the screen. Tap again and it settles back where it was.
I wanted this because album art is half the reason I like playing music at all. In a small square it's a thumbnail. Full-screen, it's the cover again, the thing you'd have looked at while holding the record.
What changed
Two things, really.
- The sleeve view itself. The art fills the screen, with the title and artist sitting under it.
- The motion between the player and Now Playing. It used to feel a bit stiff. Now the art moves into place instead of jumping, and the background fades to paper instead of cutting.
The motion was the harder part. Animation is hard to judge from a description, so I prototyped it first and fiddled with it until it felt right before building the real thing. Even then, the first version landed in a slightly different spot depending on how you got there. That's the sort of thing you only notice by using it, and it's fixed now.
I also moved everything up a little. It was centered by the numbers, but it looked like too much empty space at the bottom. Centered by eye turned out to be the right call.
Who it's for
Anyone who plays albums and likes looking at them. If you only shuffle singles, you may never tap it, and that's fine.
What's next
It's going out to testers this week. After that I'm going to go looking for other places in the app that could use the same kind of polish. I don't have a list yet, which is the point of looking.