Okay, folks...I've come to a bump in the road that requires your feedback. As a part of the current interface design revamp, I am trying to eliminate the need for the separate "play" page. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, it is rather inconvenient to navigate back to the book details page. The embedded QuickTime object in the page is rather ugly and it almost takes over the page. I'm sure some of you have noticed that you often have to tap the back button a number of times to get it to respond. In doing so, I am trying to move away from using embedded QuickTime.
The alternative approach is to use HTML5 audio tags. This allows me to keep track of where you are in an episode and display that on the page. It also allows me to get rid of the big bulky QuickTime box and, as a result, the play page as a whole. You would be able to simply tap an episode and have it begin to play. When you stopped the play, it would display your current position in the episode just below the episode name and/or grey out the episode link when you have finished. You could still tap and play it, this would just be a visual indicator of where you are in the book.
But, here's the rub: I currently have a feature that allows you to play the rest of the book from a given episode. I have yet to figure out a way to make this happen with the HTML5 audio tags. The problem is that the iPhone won't allow me to automatically initiate the playing of an HTML5 audio clip and, from what I can tell, doesn't have any means of initiating a next clip like the embedded QuickTime player does. What I think that I CAN do is detect the end of the episode and display a dialog that asks you if you would like to play the next episode. Then the user could tap Yes or No and it would initiate the next episode. The difference from the current functionality is that it would require minimal user input to continue.
So, my question to you is whether or not this minimal input is acceptable. It is not ideal, I realize. However, it allows me to provide a good amount of other functionality (as described above) and make the interface more appealing. I know what I prefer...but I want to provide the best experience that I can to all of you. So, make your opinion known in the poll below!
If you choose "Maybe", please post a comment telling me why!