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).

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.

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.

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.

Thanks for your patience during this outage!

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.

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

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:

I can’t divulge too much information at the present time, but we are working one some great updates that will hopefully improve the overall experience on all apps based on our popular Vlogger framework.  I’ll post some screenshots as soon as we’re closer to getting them dropped into the store

With the recently added ability to “link” your account, YouTube now allows google account holders to rate/comment/subscribe to content without actually having a YouTube channel on their account.

We are working on an update to support these new “linked accounts” that are active on YouTube that do not have a YouTube channel, but, in the meantime – if you would like to login to YouTube using our app – simply add a channel to your account.  It’s free, takes only a couple seconds, and it doesn’t mean you have to start uploading videos.

To add a channel to your YouTube-Linked google account, simply visit the Create Channel page on YouTube by clicking here:

Once you add a channel, you can use all of the YouTube specific functionality in our apps without issue.