ShelfPlayer - Audio Book Shelf

This app is getting really really close to perfect. It's the only one that handles seasons well! My only advice regards the mini-player animation. It is SO cool that you have emulated Apple's shrinking album cover effect (I'm geeking out about it!), but I'm not sure it's really ready for release. Until it's smooth and snappy, I'd rather have the whole player slide down off the bottom of the screen quickly and smoothly than have a fancy animation that feels slow and finicky. If it weren't for that, I could easily be convinced this app was built by the Apple devs themselves! 👏👏👏

There are now several great options for listening to audiobooks from an Audiobookshelf server on iOS. ShelfPlayer is my favorite by a lot. The design is great, and it’s ridiculously full featured. For example it’s the only app I’ve found that can add books to Collections, something I’d previously only been able to do on the browser version of Audiobookshelf. Quick tip: the app can be extensively customized. Many of its more fiddly settings are in the Settings app rather than directly in the ShelfPlayer app, which I like. I run this app on iPhone, iPad, and occasionally even on my Mac (as an iPad app) and it’s a great tool on all of them. Many thanks to this awesome developer for a polished and beautiful app.

I expected a lot more from a $5 app that is written to take advantage of the latest iOS features. While the interface generally looks nice, it is actually less user friendly and less functional than the first party Audiobookshelf app (beta is unfortunately full and it’s not yet on the App Store). Just in the first week of use, I noticed a number of issues that really need to be addressed: * Mysterious slowdowns that bring the app to a crawl such that force closing and restarting the app was the only option (encountered while queuing multiple downloads) * Mostly unusable search; searching anything other than author just doesn’t work (searches for title and other metadata just run indefinitely, never returning results) * The interface, while pretty, is just not at all intuitively designed. Finding settings was difficult, for example