I have thought through tough problems using pen and paper. Have tried a lot of iterations of digital notebooks, but lost the fluidity and malleability of paper.
These days I have found the iPad + Pencil with an infinite canvas to be the best fit. I use Ahmni (https://www.ahmni.app/) which is a delight.
It did happen in the Muslim world. There are "slave" dynasties in many parts of that world (Egypt, India) which were robust dynasties borne out of freed slaves.
my list of features needed for a usable audio player:
for audiobooks the ability to skip forward and backwards a few seconds. the best way to do that i found is to swipe left and right. short swipe is a short skip, swipe across the whole screen is maybe a minute. also the ability to quickly jump to a certain manually chosen timestamp.
also for audiobooks, the ability to bookmark positions. not all audio books have chapter markers.
for audiobooks and podcasts: list files by their names in storage sorted by timestamp or name. many podcasts and chapterized audiobooks don't set chapter or episode titles correctly. i have seen players where the title was always the title of the book or the name of the podcast, making it impossible to identify which file was which episode or chapter. also author names and even podcast titles are sometimes inconsistent, because spelling errors, different authors or multiple names for a podcast.
do not assume that the file metadata is consistent or correct and make it easy for the user to work around inconsistencies.
I made a music app for iOS for myself, after not finding anything that did what I wanted as a non-streamer: visualization, audiobooks support, section loops, bookmarks, sleep timers, import from any source, etc.
In the end, I did put it on the App Store (after months of cleanup!) but it's easily the most used app on my phone.
I made a Music app for iOS that is geared towards offline libraries and has features like visualizer, EQ, sleep timer that I couldn't find anywhere else.
I am almost ready with the music app that I have always wanted; a fully featured app for those of us who love to buy and listen to our own collection. Here is an introductory blog post: https://sakunlabs.com/blog/muziqi-intro/
Some of the features I am including in this version:
- import music from the Music app (downloaded locally), from Files app, via a web server
- a music visualizer, with three presets
- waveform views
- mark and store segments of a song
- bookmarks
- an equalizer
and a bunch of smaller features, like pinning music to the Home view, remembering playback for an album or playlist.
These days I have found the iPad + Pencil with an infinite canvas to be the best fit. I use Ahmni (https://www.ahmni.app/) which is a delight.