I wonder what's going to be in 1.6?

This what I talked about - no timeframe for a fix. Let’s continue to hope for Christmas presents - may be in next year…

It’s already Christmas today. Let’s aim for something after New Year, maybe… :slight_smile:

1 Like

That bug isn’t in Roon on that one–it’s in various OpenGL implementations, not all of which round numbers the same way (i.e. according to the standards). 99.9% of applications using OpenGL are games, and do not depend on pixel-accurate rendering. We are the 0.1%. So people making the infrastructure don’t focus on this sort of thing. If it were easy to fix this from where we sit, it would have been done years ago.

2 Likes

@Brian Does Roon team have any plans to switch to some other rendering engine or may be use native UI framework? It’s really disappointing that Roon client with mostly text content depend on OpenGL…

We used OpenGL because it is available on all four platforms that we render UI on. The only other option that meets this constraint is a web browser. Web rendering is just starting to get fast enough to support our style of UI, and it still isn’t good enough for people with 2-3yr old devices. Remember–to release this product in 2015, we had to start developing the more basic pieces back in 2011-2012. Back then, doing something like this with web technology was in “forget about it” territory, but OpenGL could already perform just fine.

If we went the “traditional” route with native UI frameworks, we would have a different UI on each platform, development of new features would take 2-3x longer, things would be constantly out of step or feeling inconsistent when moving between devices. We feel really, really strongly about this “same UI everywhere” approach and it has served us really well.

Besides…it would have taken over a year longer to launch Roon. Because of this choice, we were able to produce tablet apps only 3-4mos after desktop-only release, and phone apps about 6 months later. Those timescales would have been measured in years if we went the native route. Actually, Roon probably wouldn’t have survived financially if we moved that slowly.

As fun as it may be for you to back-seat-drive architecture decisions, I don’t think this would make people happier than the road we have chosen…

We are contemplating other options for the future…we are keeping a watchful eye on webrender to become mature/complete enough for us to port over our user interface toolkit. Right now, it is still missing some stuff we need, but the direction + performance it can achieve looks promising. We have also considered switching to Metal for iOS/Mac. Neither would be justified just to solve a minor cosmetic issue like this…we would need to see benefits proportional to the multi-month effort that either change would require.

We would not be where we are without OpenGL as a layer to standardize rendering across the platforms. If there was a better option available at the points where we made these decisions, we’d have used it. There is still not a clear better option now. You can keep being “really disappointed”, but those are the facts.

16 Likes

Brian, thank you very much for the reply, now things look much more clear. Hope you will find better solution, and we’ll get better iPad client in future…

2 Likes

Dissapointed… waiting for Qobuz integration. Would love to purchase roon… makes not sense for me without Qobuz. :frowning:
Hope it comes somewhen…

Just wanted to wish the Roon team and all the users here a Merry Christmas. :+1:

It can not be easy trying to balance expectation with the logicial progression of the software. Anyhow, I am excited for what 2019 may bring.

2 Likes

First, no, we’re not releasing before Christmas, it’s already the 24th :slight_smile: . We are in the home stretch of finishing up a significant release for early 2019.

As our membership has grown, the idea of risking a big release right before everyone is off for a few days becomes less and less palatable. We don’t want to ruin your holidays if we happen to ship a bug, and we don’t want to ruin the holidays of our support team–which is almost unavoidable releasing just before Christmas like we did last year.

It’s always funny to me how as we approach the end of a big push, working faster than ever, the sentiment that we are moving slowly always starts to crop up.

Roon is a broad product, with far more surface area than any of our direct competitors–there will always be a lot of people with different ideas about where we should go and what is important, and there will never be enough people working here to do everything people want in a short period. Even organizations with team size and funding 10-100x ours do not move their products forward as quickly as the aggregate expectations of this community imply that we should.

It takes a huge degree of focus/discipline to make any progress at all on bigger topics amidst a sea of small + medium sized requests that would take–literally–years to address. This is true of every successful product (ever visited Sonos forums or Tesla forums?). It’s almost a trope that product forums eventually get “burned to the ground” (see: Todoist) because the noise from people who want more eventually drowns out everything else. Not because the product is bad, or failing to move forward, just because at a certain community size, this phenomenon happens.

Some good ideas will be parked for years, because having the idea is the easy part. Finding the right time + way to do them, and then executing on those ideas in a sensible way is 100x harder. “How long my pet issue/feature request is taking” is an irrational way to measure a team’s output. Having a deep pool of open feature requests/areas of potential improvement is a normal state of affairs for a functioning product team. Ultimately, it’s up to us to decide what to spend time on, and where things should go

We are continuing to grow the core product, broaden compatibility with other products, address product/technical “debt”, continue with ongoing projects like the UI refresh, and plug away at big-effort stuff like mobile sync/streaming + machine-learning-based features. There will be some of the latter in this upcoming release, btw…along with plenty of other stuff.

I’m very excited about what is coming…but work takes time, and high-quality work takes more time. We don’t ever really stop working, and we don’t intend to…

Now…I’m going to sign off and bake some cookies. Happy Holidays, everyone. Thanks for all of your support. I am really excited about what 2019 will bring for Roon.

87 Likes

AirPlay 2 Support :grinning:

Thank you very much to you and the team. I will be doing a lifetime subscription in the next day or two and absolutely loved my trail period in the past 10 days or so.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year! :santa:t2: :christmas_tree: :headphones:

@brian , I disgaree with on your sentiment regarding forums. The things people care about is the stuff that gets amplified and discussed. It’s a valuable tool to keep close to customers - it costs more in the long run to garner customer sentiment without forums. It’s true that some companies cease forum support - to their long term detriment, imo.

Customers are often demanding on forums and usually highlight the weaknesses as opposed to discussing what works already, or what they like - but you should take it for what it is…a fairly disconnected view in the absence of knowledge of the detail
.
There is a huge amount of valuable feedback and information in this forum.

I agree 100% that it is up to you to decide what gets prioritised and what does not. Customers will decide whether you made the right decisions. Your efforts, hard work and patience are appreciated by me because Roon makes a positive impact on my enjoyment of music, however I am clear on the value exchange here. It’s a commercial product, not open source.

I don’t think there is any sentiment on this forum that you are moving slowly. A few posts here and there, but the overall sentiment is positive. You’ve made 5 major releases in 3 years - and a number of updates in between. That’s pretty impressive.

Anyway, have a great Christmas and enjoy the cookies. I am looking forward to continued develeopment and what we’ll see in 2019.:beers:

We don’t disagree :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Great post. Smart, frank, and logical. Thank you.

Are you at least releasing a fix for orientation and layout issues on new third generation iPad 12.9” Pro?

Yeah I believe that work has already been done.

3 Likes

Lol, good thinking! Enjoy the holidays, and thanks for the coming features and excellent support.

1 Like

Thx for the open words! I wish some nice days of vacation to you and the whole team!BR
Markus

It’s also very funny to see that each time heated topics like this almost instantly calm down after just one reply of the Roon team wich might lead to the conclusion that people just want to get informed from time to time of what’s cooking.

14 Likes

Would this big release have anything to do with Qobuz integration???

1 Like

:rofl: Patience grasshopper.