Archive for July, 2010

iOS 4? iPhone 4? New Updates submitted!

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

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 😉

New Apps and more updates coming…

Monday, July 5th, 2010

We’ve been hard at work this past weekend making several updates to our existing apps and bringing four new apps into our collection.  Check back here often for release information, and be sure to follow us on twitter for the latest updates (@geekutils).

The new updates will include:

  • Full support for the new iOS 4 features, the most notable of which is fast-app switching.
  • Updated higher resolution graphics for iPhone 4 users
  • A more consistent look across all of our “unofficial” apps

Because iOS4 is a free update for everyone, and includes some great new features that enhance the user experience on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and third generation iPod touch devices, all of our future applications will be built using the iOS4 framework instead of 3.1.2 as we have in the past.  In order to stay up to date with our latest applications, please be sure to update your devices to the latest version of iOS.

Thumbs Up / Thumbs Down Rating

Monday, July 5th, 2010

We have gotten a few people who have e-mailed us using the “Contact” link in our apps to ask when we will be officially supporting the recent change from star-based ratings to thumbs-up, thumbs-down ratings on YouTube.

The short answer is that while YouTube.com supports this functionality, the official developer programming interface that we use to interact with YouTube does not yet support this new rating system.  We hope to have an update very soon that will support the new rating system – keep checking this blog for more information.  We will also update our twitter account when it becomes available.  In the meantime, our apps will continue to support the star rating system.

Again, we thank each of you for taking the time to share your comments and feature suggestions – we can only continue to make our apps better by collecting feedback from you, our valued users.