News « GeekUtils

Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Wow – Long Time No Update

Saturday, June 30th, 2012

Fortunately for us, all of our apps are stable and our users love them. Our last post to this site, however, was in April – which may lead one to believe that we are not working on enhancements.

No updates on this site, however, doesn’t mean that we aren’t working on the next-gen products. Right now, we are currently evaluating how iOS6 is going to affect our apps, and how we may leverage new features in iOS6 to make the experience inside our apps even better. We are also currently evaluating some new playback mechanisms that would get us away from the terrible lag and buffering issues that seem to plague the built-in YouTube player on iOS devices more often than not.

We hope to have some updates for you soon – in the meantime, if you encounter an issue, or have feature suggestions – please don’t hesitate to send them our way. 🙂

Posted in News | 3 Comments »

Outage Resolved – Server is in it’s new home!

Sunday, April 22nd, 2012

Just wanted to post a quick note to let everyone know the server is back up and running in it’s new home. By now, it should have detected (and pushed) notifications for any videos that were posted by our partners today.

Thanks for your patience during this outage!

Posted in Bugs and Outages, News | 2 Comments »

Partial Outage – 4/21/2012

Saturday, April 21st, 2012

We are moving our servers to a new location on Saturday, 4/21/2012 so portions of our services will be unavailable.

All of our YouTube apps will still list and play videos fine, but the following services will be unavailable beginning around 1:30PM Eastern Time:

Push Notifications – Push notifications will not work until our server comes back online in it’s new location. Once everything is back online, it will push notifications for any videos posted during the downtime. In the meantime, simply check your app(s) periodically through the day – if any new videos are posted, they will be listed and available for playback
GeekUtils.com will be unavailable during the outage
eMail – All of our eMail addresses will be unavailble as the servers are moved to their new location. If you attempt to contact us and the email is bounced back to you, please try again on Sunday 4/22.
DEV BLOG (the tab inside all of our apps) – This tab reads geekutils.com and will be unavailable until the servers are back online
MORE APPS (tab inside all of our apps) – This tab connects to our server to get it’s application listing and will be unavailable until the servers are back online

We currently plan to be back online by midnight eastern time as a worst case scenario, and we hope to be back online much sooner. We thank you for your patience while we move our servers to a location which will help us to continue our trend of growth in the long term.

Posted in Bugs and Outages, News | 3 Comments »

Peter Hollens Official App is out!

Sunday, April 8th, 2012

When Peter Hollens contacted me a few months ago and said that he really wanted to work with me on an app I was flattered — he knew he wanted an app – and loved the workflow that the GeekUtils framework provided. I didn’t know much of Peter before this introduction, but I have grown to truly appreciate his talents – both vocally and creatively. It didn’t take long for me to happily agree to create an iOS product to showcase his content.

Peter has been involved in a capella music since 1999 when he co-founded the University of Oregon’s award winning a capella group “On the Rocks”. In 2010, Peter was featured on NBC’s “The Sing Off” and received acclaim from the judges for his solo performances.

Peter records and produces his music from his home studio in Eugene, Oregon and has recently recorded for Sony and Epic records. In February, Peter released his first full album which is available in iTunes (click here).

If you have not introduced yourself to Peter’s content yet – allow me to introduce you 🙂 Below find two videos – his latest video at the time of this writing (which has already gone viral) – a Skyrim themed video featuring Peter’s amazing a capella talents combined with Lindsey Stirling’s amazing violin performance. The second video is one that I particularly enjoy, Peter’s original song entitled “Sleepwalking”.

Check them out – then go download the app and buy his tunes 🙂

Posted in App Store, App Updates, News, Peter Hollens, YouTube | 1 Comment »

Mike Tompkins – Bully Official Music Video

Friday, March 30th, 2012

I am amazed at the partners that GeekUtils has been able to create over the short time that we’ve been building these apps. A little over a year ago, we were fortunate enough to gain the attention of Mike Tompkins – an extremely talented a capella artist. Shortly after, we released an official app for his content.

Today, Mike released the official video for the movie Bully – an inspiring film that is taking on the challenge of raising awareness of bullying, and issuing a call to action to those affected.

In Mike’s words (from the video description) –

I wrote and self-produced this song “Stand Up” to empower young people to overcome challenges tied with bullying. I ultimately would like to raise awareness and encourage young people to “Stand Up” and confront the challenges we are currently or may have in the past experienced as a young teenager.

The original music video is embedded, below. I encourage each of you to visit iTunes and purchase the song (click here) – all proceeds are going to Bully Bust – a nationwide bully awareness effort launched by NSCC.

We congratulate Mike on this awesome original tune and applaud him for his efforts to help raise awareness of this often overlooked reality.

Amazing – all sounds were created solely with Mike’s voice and mouth – how? Here’s a quick behind the scenes: