Signal 1.5
Signal 1.5 is up with some nice under the hood improvements that I’ve been looking forward to sharing with you:
Smart Player Launching
Signal is now a lot smarter about launching your media player if it’s not already running. If you connect a remote while the player isn’t running an idle now playing screen will be shown and the player won’t immediately launch. When you select a song to play or press a playback command this will kick off the player and display a message on the remote while the player is starting up. Previously Signal launched the player as soon as a remote connected and this could cause unexpected launches if you had a device in your network that maintained a long-lived connection. The new approach handles this better and generally just does what you expect.
Improved Album Art Fetching
When rapidly skipping through songs it was sometimes possible for Signal to display the wrong album art. It was also possible for cached artwork to be used if moving between songs with the same artist and album name but different album art images. Signal should now show you exactly what you see in the media player for both of these situations.
Automatic Updates
Signal can now update itself automatically in most cases. This allows for easier maintenance of headless machines and hopefully a few less update prompts for you to deal with. Updates are only applied if they will not substantially change the behavior of the app. For any release that makes a significant change the normal update prompt is displayed and you can choose whether or not to apply the update and when. For the curious I wrote a bit about the thinking behind this feature on my personal blog.
To support automatic updates on Windows Signal has moved from a per-machine to a per-user installation placed in the user’s local app data directory. This migration is handled for you automatically when updating to 1.5.