Vox - the music player you were waiting for?
Vox - the music player you were waiting for?
Source : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vox/id461369673?mt=12
Price - Free
Vox is another music player (Groove being my favourite on iOS and Ecoute on Mac, at the moment) for Mac, that I came across today - let me tell you upfront - it turned out to be quite impressive. It's a minimal player and lets you customise the features so much that you can replace iTunes with this in a few minutes for all your music needs. Mind you, this is just music player and the focus is only on that aspect - it can't do anything beyond.
It looks pretty in dark colours. You can customise it to use Mac's default keys to control Vox. The biggest plus is the ability to play almost all formats - including FLAC, AAC, OGG along with MP3. While setting up it gives an option to decide what are all the formats you want to play. It can also play music from multiple sources including folders and from your regular iTunes library. And the best thing - you can play songs from online radio services ($0.99 to enable, app is otherwise free). It supports Last.fm too. Vox's own playlist lets you drag/drop music files for playing. It also lets you to start music from the last played position. Also, you can launch/control Vox using apps like Alfred or Quicksilver.
Vox has setup voting options on it's website where it let's the users to decide what features they want to see in future versions. I voted for almost all of them 
. One thing missing is the iOS version of the app. I sincerely hope that it comes quickly. For earlier versions of the Mac OS they have a legacy version available for download.
iOS 7 Folloup
The dust is settling now after the much-awaited iOS sneak peak at the last WWDC. Several betas have come out and they are improving the product in every iteration. The opinions were widely polarised initially and the dust seems to have settling now. I am humbled too and ate my words - nothing new as these situations are so associated with anything that Apple does. It's always been part of the magical story of the company that Apple is. I remember how surprising it was to see the new look and feel - it did look a bit of android (lock screen) and windows (fonts in Contacts, white background) in parts. The home screen and the actual app’s interface looked two extremes. The fact is I, like many others, refused to accept the simple fact that iOS has entered a new phase of life - in Six years it matured and grew. iOS now clearly understands the crowd it caters to. Look at the two design issues I mentioned above - at the first look it seems like the lock screen is like one that they have in android, but the fonts? They are different. Remember the Roboto - See how subtle and beautiful the difference is.
The era of instant gratification has caught many of us unawares and we missed the larger picture. We couldn't understand, to bring such a visible change, how confident the management and the engineering teams were, how much they trusted their intuition and how they visualised the future. I didn't see it, I admit .
Apple. You taught me many things over the last 6 years.