Archive for September, 2012

Updates for iOS6 and the new iPhone 5 coming.

Saturday, September 29th, 2012

We are in the process of updating our apps to work better with the new features of iOS6 and the new screen size of the iPhone5.  Stay tuned for future updates.

Also, as an aside, we have reached a point where future updates of the app may no longer be able to support very old versions of iOS (3.x, for example).  We may need to restrict our apps to run only on iOS5 / iOS6.

We will do everything we can to continue to support the old devices while providing the best experience on iOS5 and 6.   We would, however, encourage any users using an old version of iOS to update their devices to ensure the best experience with ALL apps (not just ours).

Push Notification Outage – Resolved

Saturday, September 29th, 2012

Many of you noticed (and reported) that on 9/26, our push notification system did not appear to be working.  This was due to an authentication issue with Apple’s servers preventing our server from connecting to actually send the notifications to your devices.

As of 10:00PM Eastern Standard Time, 9/27, this issue has been resolved and push notifications should now be flowing normally.  We apologize for the interruption.

iOS6 Video Playback Quality

Saturday, September 29th, 2012

We have been getting an increasing number of users contacting us to report that the video quality in our apps has degraded since their upgrade to iOS6 – so I wanted to take a moment to describe why this is happening.

When we play videos, we are not using a player that we created, we rely on the YouTube playback mechanism built-in to the device.  In versions of iOS before 6, a YouTube app was built-in to the operating system.  When we requested that a video “play” – it was the built-in YouTube player app that would play the video.

With the release of iOS6, Apple has removed the built-in player app.  In order to keep thousands of applications in the store (like ours) that relied on this player from breaking, Apple has chosen to use YouTube’s new iFrame player (HTML5).

The good news is that all of these apps still work.  The bad news is that for some reason, the iFrame player does not quite seem to be as good with regards to quality.  Additionally, the videos seem to take a bit longer to actually start playing once the link is clicked.

Unfortunately, this player is *NOT* a part of our apps.  There is not much that we can do to change the quality of the videos that it plays.  We are investigating other options and if we can find a higher quality method of playback, we will update all of our apps to use this new method.