GeekUtils

So – in our last couple of posts we have discussed problems where videos are not available for playback in our apps, or on mobile devices in general.  It seems that YouTube has something going on that is causing uploaded videos to default to “Disabled” for mobile syndication.

When a video is “disabled” for mobile – our app cannot play it.  Of course, neither can m.youtube.com, the android YouTube player, or the iPhone/iPod YouTube player.

Unfortunately, it seems that this is happening without the knowledge of the vloggers who are posting content.  Yesterday, we found that the latest video from PhillyD was disabled for mobile and Phil’s crew corrected the issue.

Other apps currently affected are the Unofficial Shane Dawson TV app as well as the Unofficial iJustine app.  We’ve attempted to contact iJustine and Shane via Twitter, but as you can imagine – our messages have gotten lost in the shuffle.

If you enjoy watching videos from your favorites on mobile devices, and you notice this happening – let them know!  We’re pretty sure that they are not even aware that YouTube is preventing their videos from playing back on mobile.

We’ve gotten a few e-mails asking what the difference between the “Home” and “Back” button are on our wordpress blog view and/or twitter views in our app.

Once you browse away from the initial page loaded, the back button will allow you to travel back through the additional content you browse.  The back button will not, however, take you back to the initial view (these are not web pages that exist on the web – they are internal to the app) – so we added a Home button that will always load the initial view.

Example?  You’re looking at the twitter feed in the CTFxC app, and charles posts a link to another web page.  You click that link and browse to that page.  Subsequently, you click another link and travel to a second page.  Pressing the back button will take you to the first page you browsed to from Charles’ link.

Pressing the back button again will do nothing – this is where the home button comes in.  Pressing “Home” will return you back to the twitter feed.

No matter where you are, how far you are away from the root page, the HOME button always takes you back to the beginning, intended purpose for the current tab.

Thanks for the questions – remember, if you have a question, suggestion, or you just want to say hi – drop us a note using the contact button in the “About” feature of the “More” tab of any of our apps to send us a note.  You can also follow us on twitter (@geekutils) or on youtube (youtube.com/geekutils) for the latest updates with our apps.