GeekUtils

Unfortunately, I’ve been completely inundated with requests and have been hard at work on some new features we hope to release to the masses very soon – I’m afraid I’ve neglected the blog a little.

Just wanted to provide a quick update on what I’m working on for our apps at the moment:

• Push Notifications – I mentioned earlier in July that I was working on adding push support into our apps.  This is a parallel development effort to the standard release track of our apps (incremental feature additions, bug fixes, etc) – so it’s been taking a little longer than expected, but is definitely in the works.  Our goal is to hopefully have a APNS compliant push notification server of our own functional by the end of this month, with updates to all of our apps to come around the same time.
• iTunes / YouTube links – It is our goal to provide a unified experience across a particular social media footprint.  We’ve noticed that many of our content partners commonly provide links to other YouTube channels and iTunes in their descriptions.  We are performing some updates so that when possible, these links do not load secondary experiences.  For YouTube, the channels will be loaded in our common framework.  For iTunes / App Store links, you’ll be taken to the app store.
• Universal Binary (iPad Support).  Apple threw us a curveball with compatibility issues between iOS 4.0 and iPhone OS 3.2.  For some reason, when playing videos using the device’s built-in player on an iPad, the user remains “stuck” in portrait mode.  Additionally, they are left without a clean exit back to the video detail page.  We are working on a universal version of all of our apps to provide the experience people desire on the iPad.
• More Apps – We’ve got a couple of exciting applications that will be added to our lineup shortly.  We continue to be humbled by the reaction from fans of our apps, and are indebted to the awesome content creators who have allowed us to build apps for their content.  We’ll have more to share as these apps are released to the app store.

This is the “short list” of things that I’m working on adding into our apps.  We hope that you enjoy everything we’ve released so far, you enjoy the updates, and continue to support our products.

For the latest updates, follow us on twitter (@geekutils) or on YouTube (youtube.com/geekutils).

A few of you have reported to us that our latest updates to our apps will only play videos in Portrait orientation on the iPad.  We have been able to duplicate the issue and are looking for resolution.

The YouTube player that we use to play the video is the one that is built-in to the device, so we have not changed any code here.  The only thing that we can assume is that there is some form of an incompatibility between our apps built for iOS 4.0 when running on the iPad’s iPhone OS 3.2.

We have run testing on many other devices of varying firmware versions and all devices work fine in portrait or landscape mode with the exception of the iPad.

We’ll keep you posted as we look into this to see if we can push out an update that resolves this issue.  In the meantime, if you are using an iPad, you may want to hold off on the update(s)

So on the 22nd, we told you about an update that was coming soon that would:

• Allow support for both iOS4 and iPhone OS 3.0.  Our previous updates removed support for iPhone OS 3.0 – but we’re happy to announce that it is back!  Those using iPhone OS 3.x will still enjoy the same functionality they always have.  Those who are using iOS4 can now utilize fast app switching, and those with the iPhone4 can now enjoy high resolution graphics!
• A small bug fix to our video listing view
• A new “Copy Link” function via the actions menu on blog entries, videos, channels, and store items that will copy a link to the current content to your clipboard so that you can easily tweet, SMS, or otherwise post a link to your favorite social networking site.

We just got notification of availability from Apple, so it may take a few hours before the update shows “available” and appears in your “Updates” section of the app store.

Also – the update for Unofficial iJustine that fixes display issues on the mobile blog view and includes the features above is now available as well.

We hope you are enjoying the updates.  If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions – please contact us via the About tab in any of our apps!