GuitarTapp 2.6 published to Android Market

We’ve published the latest version to the Android Market yesterday. Lots of improvements in this new version! Check out what we’ve done below.

Major improvements to favorites

Improved Favorites screen

We’ve drastically changed the way favorites are displayed. Instead of one big list showing all your favorites (including files and setlists), we’ve separated them. The favorites screen now first shows the options Bands, All Songs, Tags, Setlists, My Files and Dropbox. Clicking one of those options will take you to a filtered view of your favorites, increasing usability and performance. As you may have noticed, we’ve added 2 more options to your favorites: Tags and Dropbox. Tags allow you to assign keywords to songs, and apply them as a filter. For example, you might have 3 songs tagged as “Rock,Acoustic”, “Rock”, and “Humor,Acoustic,Country”. Picking tag “Rock” from the tags list will show you songs 1 and 2, and tag “Acoustic” will show you songs 1 and 3 etc. Another cool new feature is the Dropbox support we’ve added:  files in your Dropbox with extensions .txt, .crd and .tab will be available for opening in GuitarTapp, adding to setlists, add/edit song information (including the new tags), and editing.

Additional navigation controls

We’ve added previous/next buttons to the tab viewer:
- If you came from a list of song versions, 2 buttons on top will allow you to browse to the previous and next song version so you won’t have to go back to the list to pick another version. This allows you to quickly determine what version looks best to you!
- If you came from a setlist, 2 buttons at the bottom of the tab will be added that allow you to quickly jump to the previous and next  song on the setlist, and will also give you hints like ‘End of set 2′ and ‘End of setlist’, so you know when you can take a break without having to think twice!

Previous/next tab buttons

Previous/next setlist buttons

UI improvements

We’ve spiced thing up a bit by adding more info to search results and other lists. And it looks cooler too…

Another UI feature we added is being able to tap the title bar to scroll back to the top instantly. Extremely useful if you’re viewing a large tab and want to go back to the start!

Smoother AutoScroll

AutoScrolling is now soooo smooth, sometimes you have to look closely to check if it is really running!

App2SD enabled

Although  GuitarTapp has a small footprint (about 700KB), we’ve enabled App2SD functionality which allows the app to be moved from internal memory to the SD card. If it helps you getting that bit of extra space on your phone/tablet memory free, this one’s for you.

Tablet optimizations

We’ve spent quite a bit of time running GuitarTapp on some tablets, improved its looks, and worked around some nasty issues of Android 3.0/3.1. An additional note about those Android versions: if you can update to 3.2, do it as soon as you can..

GuitarTapp home (search) screen on tablet

GuitarTapp Tab viewer on a tablet

Bugs we’ve sent to the graveyard

- The orientation (blank screen) bug. Rotating the device while viewing a tab, on some devices caused the tab viewer to display a blank screen. Sorry for this. Fixed it.
- Occasional “Not connected” message when you actually do have a connection. We haven’t been able to reproduce this in v2.6 so it is almost safe to say we’ve fixed it. Correct us if we’re wrong.
- Some other bugs that apparently went unnoticed by you – gone!

Thanks again for everyone that took the time to e-mail us about issues and feature requests! Keep them coming!

GuitarTapp server temporarily unavailable – fixed

Our apologies, the GuitarTapp server is currently unavailable; if you get “error getting data” messages, this is because the server is currently not working correctly. We are working hard to get this fixed as soon as possible!

Update: Our server is working correctly again. Our web hosting company fixed their faulty server, everything’s running as expected again.

GuitarTapp 2.0 published to the Android Market

A quick note here to let you all know we’ve released GuitarTapp 2.0 into the Android Market. We didn’t expect this process to go as quickly as it did, so this is fantastic news for us. It’s available for an introductionary price of €1.49

We’ve been working on version 2.0 for a couple of months now and we’ve made quite a few cool changes, we’ll give you a quick run-through of the highlights:

• AutoScroll speed is now controlled by a touch slider control, which defines the scrolling speed in time (minutes and seconds) it takes to scroll the entire tab down. This makes setting the scroll speed childsplay, as you can simply set it to roughly the length of the song
• Rating tabs: you can now rate tabs, add comments and share your reviews with your friends by posting them to Facebook and Twitter
• Transposing chords got a whole lot easier: no need to type in the amount of steps anymore; just select Up or Down and the amount of steps (half notes, 1-5) and hit Transpose
• Chord diagrams: We’ve built in a chord dictionary containing hundreds of chords, fingering alternatives and extra chord info
• Last but not least – we’ve spiced up the layout a bit here and there..

We’ve made GuitarTapp compatible with Android versions 1.6 and up. Android 1.5 support will be looked into. This new version of GuitarTapp (2.0) will also be published to the Nokia Ovi store within a couple weeks, we’ll keep you posted on this.

Enjoy some screenshots taken on an HTC Hero running Android 2.1 below:

Visit the GuitarTapp page in the Android Market: GuitarTapp 2.0 for Android