Since I could not make it to vidcon last weekend (other than watching the livestream), I decided to spend the weekend working on updates to the framework that drives the “Vlogger” apps. I’ve submitted these updates to Apple for review, so hopefully they will be live and available to everyone in the coming days from the app store. These updates are significant, and are built for use with iOS 4. What do these updates include? Well – here’s a short rundown:
- Built to take advantage of iOS 4 (Yes, that means you will need to be running iOS 4 in order to download the new updates)
- With full support for iOS 4’s fast app switching, you can stay up to date with your latest vlogger’s videos and have the convenience of not having to watch the app load from scratch each time it’s launched. This is supported on the latest iPods, the iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4.
- Video listings, store listings, and blog entries will automatically refresh for the latest content at pre-defined intervals (or, of course, you can still manually refresh any listings whenever you choose).
- Built to take advantage of the iPhone 4’s retina display.
- All graphics and thumbnails in the app will now load at a resolution which just looks amazing when you are on an iPhone 4. For all other devices, the apps continue to run just as smoothly as they always have.
- Browser views have all been updated with both a home and a back button. The home button always re loads the screen as it was when you originally loaded the content. The back button always takes you back one page in your navigation tree.
- YouTube like / dislike support is now fully implemented rather than the old five star rating system. Video listings and detail views have also been updated to show you what percentage of voters like a particular video.
- Video listing view has been updated with a slightly new look.
- Network communication between our app and YouTube’s API has been significantly optimized. When fetching comment and video listings, our app now transmits and receives up to 60% less data to provide the same content. This means that video and comment listing views now load quicker than ever before.
This is only the tip of the iceberg! We have many more updates planned (including push notifications for new content) – Keep checking our blog at www.geekutils.com or via the “Dev Blog” view inside any of our apps to stay up to date with what is coming. With that, I say thank you and provide a few screenshots, below 😉