Any app on a phone or tablet that displays video needs a way to skip forward and back other than trying to drag a little cursor along a bar. If I’m watching something that is hours long and I want to skip forward or backwards a few minutes, it’s just comically impossible.
Many apps have +15/-15 buttons to skip forward or backward 15 seconds. And as long as you can hit +15 a few times in quick succession, you can easily skip forward or backward minutes at a time.
Why don’t they all have that?
grrrrrr…
Oh, and on the subject of streaming apps, I have no problem with there being ads in, for instance, full length episodes of tv shows on the network’s streaming app. That’s how they make their money, I get that. And clearly they don’t want me to be able to just drag the cursor past the ad break and skip the ads entirely.
But they should have a reasonable behavior for the situation where I’ve already watched the first 2/3 of the show and want to start out past the 4th ad break. Don’t make me watch 4 straight sets of ads before I can start watching the show.
I suspect some large number of apps use whatever video player is embedded in the device OS, just dressed up with different skins and so forth. If that skip feature isn’t built in, it would take skilled coding to write and implement… and AFAICT 90% of apps are built Lego-style, by assembling features and SDK elements. Very little original code and development.
I’m sure that’s true, but it doesn’t really affect my rant. It’s clearly not the case that it’s somehow impossible for an iPhone app to have those buttons, because some of them do.
Except of course given that I’m watching ads, and am in fact perfectly willing to watch ads, I’m not really getting it for free. Not like I’m ranting about how the torrents that I illegally downloaded still have ads in them, or something like that.
…and most apps are written by individuals or small groups, without formal design, review or much attention to feedback. It’s like what used to be common in old-school software, where you got what one - or one controlling - programmer thought you should have, and nothing more.
So if an app writer thinks it’s too hard, or unnecessary, or inelegant to provide the skip buttons… oh, well. (Most apps seem to have about an hour of work in them… click together the legos, add some pretty graphics, publish, wait to get rich and/or become a subnet ghod.)
I suspect that some of this is legacy DRM/anti-ad-skipping bullshit. For example, Tivo (and all other DVRs) record shows on a hard drive. Hard drives are unlike tapes in that they provide random access to any particular data. So there’s no actual need in Tivo to make me fast forward or fast rewind through an entire show. Except if I did that, I wouldn’t catch fleeting glimpses of ads, and that would make advertisers mad.
NetFlix has a button to go back 10 seconds; otherwise, you have to scrub backwards. If you are thinking “Wow, I really need to watch that whole scene again!” you’re either tapping dozens of times, or doing your best to get within a minute or two of the start using the scrubber.
And it’s not like they’re inventing video players from scratch. Even a DVD-like ability to jump to key points would be invaluable.
Eh… I’m talking about, for instance, the Twitch.tv app… clearly a professional app written by professionals, which actually has some really nice features (for instance, you can switch to an audio-only stream, at which point you can keep listening to the audio from your stream while running other apps. The way you can switch the bandwidth is also very nice. Many nice features…) BUT a big gaping one that is missing.
And honestly, I still have no idea what your point is. I’m saying “this is missing, and it sucks”. You are saying “well, the people who developed it took lots of shortcuts”. Right. And it sucks. Why would that in any way negate my rant? If you were saying “well, here are some technical reasons why that is RIDICULOUSLY difficult” or “here’s a counterargument as to why the thing you think you want would actually make things worse”, that would make sense, but you sort of are saying “well, you THINK that’s frustrating to you but it turns out that the people who made your app are lazy”. Uhh, sure?
That would make sense if all there was was a “2x” forward speed mode or something. But the apps I’m thinking of happily let you drag the little cursor to anywhere on the timeline, including such huge jumps that you clearly see nothing at all of anything in between. They seem to want to allow you to just go to any specific time, but then you can’t really usefully use that feature without massive frustration because of the dragging resolution on a small phone screen.
I think you’re taking my comments as some kind of counter-argument, when I’m agreeing with you that a lot of apps - big, small, indy and mega-pro - have flat-out sucky implementation. I’ve been in the game long enough to see this cycle on multiple platforms, and IMHO all that’s happening right now is that a lot of app developers (y’know, we useta call 'em programmers, before they became Software Architects and then morphed into App Developers) - that each generation of such developers does the laziest possible job of gluing together SDK and API blocks as long as they can.
Users are so wowed by the new platform and things like color screens and touch and so forth that it’s a long time before they realize that the programs/applications/apps are pretty shittily constructed. A huge number of users fall into the “it must be me” trap as well - they’re just not smart enough or familiar enough with their new toy to really understand how the apps work, right?
So the lack of a video app to implement an integral feature like skip-back is because the app dev team was too lazy to include the buttons or thought it would clutter up their kewl dezign. The lack of any app to work smoothly and intuitively and with a complete range of functionality is often because the dev geniuses got tired of building their lego creation and went off to TED talks. But, y’know, it’s both on an iPhone-by-gawd and free, so what’s the problem?