🟢
New
- Wallpaper support
- Navigation scrubbing
- Session save & restore
- Feed / recommendations customization
- Movie, Television, and Apps pages customization
- Home Directory
- New Settings pages
- Graphics modes
- Support for non Shield devices
🔵
Improved
- Performance improvements across the board
- App start up time (from ~9 seconds to ~3 seconds)
🟣
Fixed
- A lot
Wallpapers
Dispatch now includes support for wallpapers. You can pick an image from your device and use it as a featured photo for your TV. For now, there is only support for local files. Future efforts will provide support from various online sources as well.
You can access these options from Settings → General → Home & Wallpaper → Look & Feel.
There are some additional options for wallpapers, such as changing the brightness of the image as well as and the style of the "feed hint"
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Navigation Scrubbing
Navigation scrubbing occurs when the use holds a navigation button in one direction. Depending on where you are in the app,
how
scrubbing behaves will differ. Here are some examples of how scrubbing looks in various contexts:·
Session save & restore
Dispatch will now attempt to restore your last session on start up. This means that if the app is closed in the background by the OS, when starting up again, it will attempt to re-position itself from where you left off. Here's what that looks like in action:
This feature is optional and can be turned off from Settings → Experience → Save & restore state. Note that in this example, this feature works even if the user force closes the app. This is only for demo purposes. During normal usage, state restoration will only kick in if the OS has killed the app in the background, and not when the user has deliberately chosen to close Dispatch themselves.
Currently, sessions are only saved when navigating the home tab. Future releases will enable this feature app-wide.
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Feed Customization
You can now customize how your home feed is organized. There are a few different options, so please take a look! You can configure your feed from Settings → General → Home & Wallpaper → Personalize Media Feed.
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Movie, Television, and Apps pages customization
You can now change which list is shown at the top of the movie and television pages. The default is new movies / television, but you can also choose trending movies / television or watchlisted movies / television.
For the apps page, you can choose to include non-Android TV apps in your app list.
You can find these options in Settings → Media & Apps
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Home Directory
The Home Directory is a new view that can be accessed by pressing the left navigation button while on the first item of a row in your home feed. It shows a zoomed out view of your feed whilst allowing you to quickly move up or down.
The Home Directory also becomes visible while scrubbing the home page in the vertical direction.
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New Settings Page
The Settings page has been completely rebuilt. Efforts will continue to be made so that all the various options (present and future) are as intuitively organized as possible.
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Graphics modes
Dispatch now comes with 3 graphics modes to help target various Android TV devices out there.
- High
- Medium
- Low
You can find these options in Settings → Advanced → Graphics Settings
High
is the default for high-end devices such as the Shield TV Pro. When this option is used, Dispatch will use the most amount of animations and graphical flourishes. As you descend the graphics settings from there, various effects are turned off or reduced in order to ensure the best possible performance.Medium
is the default for devices like the Chromecast with Google TV 4K, and Low
is the default for even lower-end devices or instances of Android TV built directly into your TV / display. Please note that Dispatch is a fairly large application that prioritizes presentation, animations, and large images. Unfortunately, the landscape of Android TV devices is currently dominated by low-end devices with weak CPUs and very low amounts of RAM. As such, while I am happy with the level of optimizations reached thus far (especially with the help of these graphics modes), one should not expect any miracles. It's very possible that if your device is too slow, Dispatch will never perform satisfactorily on it.
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Support for non-Shield devices
With this beta release, testers are encouraged to try Dispatch on non-shield Android TV devices. Please report any device specific issues you encounter.
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Additional changes
- You can now change the weather scale from Celsius to Fahrenheit
- You can now change the clock format from 12 hours to 24 hours
- You can now manage your favorite apps from Settings → General → Favorite Apps. You can still favorite / unfavorite apps by long clicking apps on the apps page or from the favorite apps row.
- You can now disable "Immersive Mode" for App Peek. When disabled, the home feed (or wallpaper) will no longer fade away when an app peek card is showing. As a reminder, App Peek cards are shown when App Peek is enabled and the user has highlighted an app in the favorite apps row. These settings can be changed from Settings → General → Favorite Apps
- You can now choose whether your Watchlist is merged into your Watch Next row on your home page, as well as whether New Movies and New Television are merged into a single What's New row. These options are found in Settings → General → Home & Wallpaper → Personalize Media Feed → General
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What's Next?
With this beta, Dispatch 1.0 is feature complete. Going forward, I will only be focusing on bug fixes and other tasks tied specifically to going public. Thanks for reading and thanks for all your help so far!
Note: this update will require a fresh install