Archive for the ‘iPhone Apps’ Category

Unofficial iJ App Now Available

Friday, January 22nd, 2010
ScreenShot

Unofficial iJ ScreenShot

Well, it’s official.  Our first project entitled “Unofficial iJustine – Browser and Player” has made it’s way into iTunes and is now available for iPod Touch and iPhone customers worldwide.  For those of you who don’t know who iJustine is – well, you’re missing out.  She is an up and coming vlogger, sketch comedianne, techno geek, mac addict, and all around cool gal.  We’ve been following her now for quite some time, and noticed that there isn’t really a good way to follow her particular combination of content easily from one conveniant app.

In steps our new app.  We think it’s a really cool little app and plan on reusing the codebase to support other popular internet phenoms like iJustine.  This first iteration is basically a read-only version that we are using to test the waters and track the popularity of such an app.  We are already working on v1.2 and v1.3 (v1.1 was the initial launch to the store) – which will add new functionality that allows you to rate and comment the vlogger’s youtube content.  This functionality will be very important to the future success of the application, because one of the key ways that bloggers/vloggers use to communicate with their fan base is the comment system.  Additionally, we plan to replace the twitter feed functionality in this next version with a newer, faster version.

The goal of this series of apps is to allow you to follow your favorite blogger or vlogger and all of the media outlets that they may utilize from a single place.  Are you an iJustine fan?  Are you curious as to who she is – check out our app – we think you’ll like what you see!  If you want to see what iJustine is up to – visit her website by clicking here.

YouTube slow in the evening?

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

We’ve noticed over the past couple of months that evening YouTube performance is getting increasingly worse. This has been especially true on our mobile devices that we use in our test lab. Between the hours of 5:30PM and 11:00pm EST, YouTube streaming can get quite sporadic and unresponsive. We are currently working on applications for the iPhone and iPod touch platform that utilize the device’s built-in YouTube player, so initially we thought perhaps we had a bug that was causing the problem.

Further investigation and countless hours of internet searching have illustrated to us that this is a widespread issue. In fact, this evening, while showing off our new iPhone application, we were side-by-side streaming content from YouTube on our 27″ iMac development machine and our iPhone 3GS and both would stutter and pause during playback. The desktop version of the stream even waited for around 30 seconds to start playing!

It is currently our belief that all of the new YouTube services that are being offered, when combined with the huge amount of high-definition content being uploaded, is simply taxing the YouTube server farm. We hope to see resolution to this soon – our latest apps depend on it 😉

In the meantime – a quick solution that someone has suggested to us (not ideal, but it works) is to switch your iPhone wireless off if you’re going to be streaming during these hours until this problem is resolved. When you switch wireless off, the iPhone YouTube player will automatically stream the lower bandwidth h.264 or MP4 video streams which are lighter weight and do not seem to be as affected by these issues.