Hey all, sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. I tried to distance myself from personal projects for a bit because it became a sort of obsession. I end up having a love/hate relationship with it haha.
With that being said, I’ve been diving more into what UX meant on my eink phone and how I could have some fun with it. Looking back at previous digital experiences , the Windows Phone UX really stood out to me as a time I really enjoyed big tech and pushing the idea of meaningful ux. The simple yet robust UI, I thought, had a really good balance of fun and useful. Meaningful action placement for use with one hand, large readable text, consistent layout, etc… It was a blast to use.
I took that and tried to simplify it more and thus came PaperUI. A reusable component library I’ve created (not published anywhere yet) to be used in my apps moving forward. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and have really enjoyed it. I’ve created 3 new apps with it and will eventually launch those when I feel like they’re solid enough to “drop and walk away”. App maintenance isn’t something I see myself spending a lot of time on so please keep that in mind when consuming the forthcoming apps. PaperUI works as a parallax scroller horizontally (like flipping a page in a book).
There’s still a lot of work to be done on the following apps and I’ll be taking my time with them. I hope my existing apps continue to be helpful for users (I know YouTube streaming is currently broken in CalmMusic) while I work through these.
Apps I’m considering releasing
PaperMessages
This is a fork from InkMessage that I’ve overhauled pretty extensively. The original creator did a very good job with the foundation, I just added on. This uses PaperUI, supports reactions from and to Android/iPhone. Supports all the same media as InkMessage, and has a Mac companion app for texting via your Mac. I’ll go into that more in another post, potentially.
PaperTunes
This is a fork of the extremely popular ArchiveTune. I chose this fork because the team behind ArchiveTune (and SimpMusic and OuterTune) do a TON of work on the regular to react to the breaking changes YouTube rolls out. I have a hard time maintaining CalmMusic as myself. ArchiveTune also has full YouTube Music library support meaning you can manage your cloud library via YouTube Music on the web (or another device) and it will stay up-to-date on your Kompakt. I have stripped down the UI to include only the essentials for enjoying cloud music trying to stay true to my mindful/non-intrusive app strategy. ArchiveTunes does support local files but not to the extent that CalmMusic did. I’m working to remedy this. ArchiveTunes does support adding local files to YTM playlist for mixed playlist support like CalmMusic does. This app also uses the PaperUI.
PaperScores
I’m really not sure if I’ll release this one or not but it was a really fun project and the app is a blast to use. This is a Soccer (football) scores app that I created mainly to follow the World Cup but works for all tournaments/leagues. The hesitation to release is because this uses a scrape of FotMob’s website APIs. I don’t know exactly what that means for rate-limiting or ip banning on their end. I’m still doing some testing but if I feel confident, I’ll release it for anyone who cares.
Glad to hear you’re taking the space you need to from this stuff. Can’t speak for others but I would rather see app builders taking their time and enjoying themselves than stressing out just to churn out something for the rest of us to use. That said I’m really excited to see what you do with PaperApps!
Excited to see the new apps! I’ve been playing with a new SMS app built to look like the Kompakt’s default with an optional iMessage integration via Bluebubbles. Assuming you are able to release PaperMessages it might make more sense to start from that as a base.
PaperMessages is ultimately a fork from InkMessage so unless you just want my PaperUI or Mac companion app, you could fork from InkMessage and still have a decent base.
I’ll be taking on a few beta testers soon for the PaperApps suite if you’re interested. Just shoot me a dm and I’ll send you the APKs when they’re ready.
P.S. I keep coming back to CalmMusic and wanting to use the app, but for some reason, while I can find tracks (via YouTube), I just can’t play any music! I use other apps to stream music with no issues. Not sure if there’re any special settings in the app that I may need to adjust? Thank you!
Hey, I’ve dropped CalmMusic support in favor of building this PaperTunes app because dev time was too high on CalmMusic managing the YouTube connection myself. PaperTunes is a fork of ArchiveTune so I can rely more heavily on their team managing the YouTube integration (they’re very good at it) and reacting to Google changing things.
I’ll have the test ready very soon. Probably over the weekend.
ArchiveTune was less focused on local music and preferred YouTube Music for everything so I’ve changed a lot of that to match CalmMusic for local music.
You will be able to mix YouTube Music and local music in one playlist.
If you have a YouTube Music account you will be able to login and sync those so using the website on your desktop and it will keep it in sync for all streamed music.
That means creating playlist can be done from the YouTube Music website and used/updated via the PaperTunes app
Local music in synced playlists obviously won’t show up on the YouTube Music website but they will remain in the playlist on PaperTunes even after the playlist is updated on the website and synced to your phone
Local music is in the forefront of your library but is enhanced by YouTube Music during import
Browsing the YouTube Music is similar to CalmMusic
It’s mindful but is a little more robust in PaperTunes
You are never suggested music
There is no “discover” screen
There IS an artist screen now that shows new releases, albums, songs. This will be improved over time
sounds amazing! I would love to be a beta tester as well, though I am a bit busy at the moment and have to see, how detailed I can feedback. Will you be able to download full albums with one click with PaperTunes? Really excited for those apps! Thanks so much @davidray for your great work of improving this phone! With all these apps from the community, the kompakt is more and more getting everything you could hope for in a degoogled, low-distraction e-ink phone!
Hey @davidray , trying not to put any pressure on you as a hobby-app-developer but still being very excited about this PaperApps idea I wanted to ask if there is any idea about a potential release?
Hey all, I’ve been checked out for a bit and it’s been pretty nice but I’m going to try to get these out to you this week. I think it’s mostly onboarding on the apps that needs to be tightened up. I use them all daily and they have worked really well.
I think I will release PaperTunes, PaperMaps, PaperScores, PaperMail, and PaperCal first. PaperMessages is something I use literally everyday but I’m not sure it’s ready for production.
I would still consider this much a work in progress but it is very mature in it’s stage because it is forked from ArchiveTune which is heavily active in development.
I will release updates as I have them but because there are no active stores for Mudita at the moment, you will need to check back here for the updates (or my Github)
The onboarding process is only a few days old so please be patient as you work through that part as some stages might be a little slow depending on the size of your local and YouTube libraries. I will work on making it more informational as it works through the libraries so you have a better understanding of what it’s actively doing.
Important: When you log in to YouTube it will briefly show you the YouTube Music website so it can scrape a few things from there like your login token. Give it a moment and that window will close and you’ll be back in the PaperTunes UI. This is exactly how ArchiveTune works so if you want a deeper understanding of what it’s doing, please see their Github.
Updates to artist detail screens will come in updates soon that will expand on seeing things like their full song list, full album list, etc… instead of just their recent releases or top songs.
Downloads are intentionally slow! This is by design from ArchiveTune so that YouTube doesn’t rate limit the request or shut it down entirely.
A few notes on PaperUI (which these new apps will all use).
90% of your actions are in the bottom application bar with the intention of limiting having to reach. These are shown by icons with no labels so they limit screen real estate BUT the ellipsis on the right side will expand the bar to show labels so you can learn the actions.
The ellipsis can also hold more actions in an expanded list for screens with more than 4 actions. You’ll see this on the playlist detail screen in PaperTunes for instance.
The panoramic pages are intended to be swiped through with a preview of the next so you can see what’s on the next page. The swipe is intentionally non-animated for the sake of eink. You can also tap the headers at the top to jump through the pages if you like.
I swapped the scroll bar for dots that represent vertical pages. These dots will cap out at 10 dots and then show you a little dot representing there are more pages. This little dot can be tapped to jump all the way to the last page. You can tap any of the other normal dots to jump to that page.
I’ll be releasing updates to PaperUI (and apps that use it) over time as well to hopefully improve UX.
What, “only” 6 apps ?? I just fell off my PaperChair !
Just to be clear: PaperTunes replaces CalmMusic ? Or is that a different project ? And PaperMaps replaces CalmDirectory ? The initial simplicity of CalmDirectory was great though, will you continue this app ?
Thanks so much 
I just fell off my PaperChair ! 