App Profile: Vermont Public

Loo Plunger

Rating: 5/5

The bugs have been worked out over the last year or two, the app runs flawlessly now. The FM radio broadcast of VPR is spotty in our location, and streaming on archaic DSL was unreliable. High speed EC fiber and a new cell tower are welcome arrivals in our area of rural Central Vermont! Streaming VPR has now released us from playing ripped or downloaded music from a hard drive. Wish there was more bluegrass and folk and other genres included in the program of the VPR Replay stream, and more vocal music on VPR Classical.

mrooneyvt

Rating: 1/5

Unfortunately, the latest release of this app is, if anything, worse for rural users than previous versions.. The app’s Home Screen has so many dense graphics on it that it takes too long to load. Even worse, the app will not play the stream until all the graphics finish loading. The app should be designed to work in Vermont where cellular and WiFi signals vary greatly in strength and availability. It should take the user’s bandwidth into account when it loads screens and keep track of when it has played the introductory sponsor list so it does not play them every few minutes as it switches bandwidth sources. Too bad the app was not developed by one of the many Vermont based mobile developers who know about Vermont’s internet connection issues. Another big failure in this app is when it loses whatever signal it is using, it gives up and requires the user to hit the play button again. The right way to implement the app is to have it retry until it gets reconnected again. Test the app everywhere it is going to be used instead of in a development lab with high speed Internet.

joeyc923

Rating: 5/5

Open the app and just hit the play button, no fuss it just works. Plus you can pause for a couple minutes and come back without having to listen to the initial add again which is really nice.