Trackhunter Features in Development: Getting feedback

Monday, March 14, 2016

by Keith Boynton

I want to get closer to Trackhunter users and better understand what's needed to make it an even more useful tool for DJs to find new underground digital dance music. So, the next release is mainly about doing just that...

What am I working on?

There are basically three main areas that I'll be focussing on in this next release;

1. Adding the ability to easily send feedback from inside the app or on the website
2. A framework to catch any crashes or errors and notify support about them straight away
3. Adding the ability to subscribe to email updates from inside the app or on the website so you can be notified of what's going on and coming up

Of course I will be fixing bugs and doing general maintenance too and the known issues flagged to be resolved are:

All versions

1. Beatport cover art fetch failing
2. Stop marking tracks as listened when jumping back in the playlist

Mac version

1. Too many error messages when playing back faulty preview files
2. Selecting a single track other than the playing one doesn't enable the Add or Remove from Shortlist buttons

How could it be good for you?

Making it easy to send feedback will let me know what you need Trackhunter to do to make it work even better for you. Catching crashes or errors and notifying me about them straight away will let me get on with fixing them much sooner so they don't happen again for you or anyone else. Giving you the opportunity to subscribe to email updates will make it so I can let you know about new features that you may need before Trackhunter works in the way you want it to.

Where am I with it?

I'm at the research and design stage at the moment, I don't imagine the work to be too involved and I think it will be more about spending the time designing how it might work best. The feedback and email subscribe elements should be relatively trivial to implement whereas the framework to catch and notify about crashes or errors will probably require more effort but it's not something cutting edge so shouldn't be too involved. The bugs and general maintenance all appear pretty straightforward and just require time.

How far away is it?

At the moment I'm also focussing on making sure the Mac AppStore version is brought up to date with the version available on the website so there is an element of risk that my attention will be diverted back to any issues there. If there's only a little impact from that I think a release around mid April 2016 is realistic.