Gesture Music Player was reviewed just under a week ago and if you've read the review, you'll know that when the app first hit the market about a month ago, I made some suggestions to the developer in the MSFT marketplace review. The first update included many of the features I had asked for. I again made some more suggestions after the first update and in just under a week the developer has updated it again to fix some of the problems and other features I wanted to see.
The newest update now includes a short tutorial on how to use the app when you first launch it, something that was missing in the first iterations. The overall app feels a whole lot smoother and gestures still work extremely well.
One of the issues I had after the first update was regarding the album art. First, it would take up the whole screen which caused it to be a bit distorted. Also, when switching to tracks which had no album art, the screen would still display the previous song's album art.
The newest update fixes both of these. Album art switches without a hitch and songs without one get a default image. The album art also no longer covers the whole screen and instead is half-displayed in a rotating turntable to the left of the screen which I think looks and works awesome. Credit to the developer for this excellent idea.
A much needed feature that I had originally suggested is also now included and that's the ability to browse through the song list of the playlist that's currently playing. Just like before, you can double-tap to bring up the song browser which will display the songs in the playlist, or you can swipe horizontally to access your other playlists or songs. Also added was the disabling of the lock screen time out, a much needed setting for in-car use.
Gesture Music Player is definitely the best app of it's kind now and there's only a few more nitpicks that could be addressed. When using the app, if you press the phone's "home" button to access another app such as navigation then switch back to Gesture Music Player via the "home" button, double-tapping doesn't display the Playlist song list anymore so you'll have to restart the playlist to access it. Re-accessing the app via long-holding the "back" button has no problem however. Also, toggling the shuffle via a swipe up or down would be a lot easier than the tap-and-hold and then pressing the shuffle button.
The only other things are cosmetic wise and of course are personal preference. I appreciated the removal of the super-colorful background image but the default album art could be a bit "cooler" looking. Also, I'd still like to see a nice high-definition metro-style tile.
Still, with all these updates, Gesture Music Player has now become my default in-car music player. If you love playing music through your phone and need to control it via gestures, this is the app to get. The best part is that it's free (and I'd gladly pay for an app like this) so give it a try and give the developer some love by rating and leaving a review.
I'm still surprised by the responsiveness of the developer to add in all these features I've been requesting. Although I haven't directly contacted the developer, I'm pretty positive that they've been reading the reviews I've been leaving since it's the only review up so far and there's no other way to contact them. All the suggestions I've been requesting have been implemented from the creation of the app and it's grown from a simple app to one that's fully featured and looks great.
Excellent apps like these with an active developer willing to take up suggestions are what help make the Windows Phone community grow and become better in my opinion. If the developer happens to be reading this, I truly appreciate the hard work you're putting into this app.
You can read my original review followed by the review update found on this page by clicking here.
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