Uhm, haven’t written anything here for a while, the last update seems pretty stable so in the run up to christmas I’ve been winding down a little. I’ve been improving testing, but nothing really significant has turned up so far, I’ll be improving the testing environment over the next couple of weeks to prepare the ground for more updates in the future. I doubt I’ll get a significant update out before Christmas so that’s it for the year, but plenty of new stuff to look forward to in the new year!

After working hard to put the last release out, I’ll be working on tweaking my online presence and improving marketing for the next couple of weeks.

There’s still a bunch of new features to do so there will be updates in the near future!

Well, combination of things, summer’s been around so I’ve been taking a few days off by the lake, and I also went to the Zurich Open Air festival to see a bunch of bands I wanted to see for ages.

On top of that, I’m learning all about how to use web based APIs to add some functionality (you’ll be able to directly download vids from dropbox), it’s all a bit unfamiliar at the moment as I’m not dealt much with web based queried and JSON, but I’m picking it up quick, still I run into some unexpected problems here and there.

Rest assured, a new release will be released as soon as it’s ready, hopefully in the next week or two.

I’m working on some new features, but it’s in an area I’m unfamiliar with, so I’m having to do a bit of learning and been down a few blind alleys. Once I get over the first hurdles I’ll be back in familiar territory, new updates soon.

EDIT: Further to this, I finally figured out how to get my OAuth tokens and am now figuring out the whole web APIs and JSON stuff for online cloud services. I found getting the token to be very confusing and poorly documented, but once I got access, using the APIs seems much simpler.

Been a bit quiet the last couple of weeks haven’t I? Took some time off for the local Blue Balls festival here in Luzern (That is the real name, I’m unsure if the swiss were aware of the double entendre…).

Anyway, back to work this week and working on a new feature which should be pretty exciting, keep checking for updates!

OK, so I’ve come up with a workaround to the orientation of videos filmed on apple devices, we can apply the rotation when the video is played (Which was already happening with portrait videos). This isn’t as good as converting the video to the correct orientation as additional real time processing is required. I will continue to look into the problem and see if I can raise a bug on it, or find a more effective workaround.

Next release should be out in a few days.

Ugh, now I’m having troubles with importing non standard orientation videos detected while testing the next release. The AVAssetExportSession is giving me memory problems and crashing the app when I try to correct the orientation for videos filmed on Apple devices, works great for any normally orientated video… I’m finding a workaround, but the release is delayed.

I’ve removed the standard UIImagePickerController to let users pick photos and videos from their camera roll, and while it functions pretty well at that, it had the annoying habit of automatically displaying videos and images on the external display, for my application, this is undesirable, as we’re already using the secondary display for our own purposes.

So I decided to build my own copy of the picker controller, fairly simple to do using the photos framework, a table view, a collection view and some views for displaying videos and images. But then I ran into trouble again with the AVPLayerViewController I was going to use so the user can check the video before importing. While it presents properly at first, there’s a full screen icon that can be selected and again, the video takes over the external display. It’s possible for the AVPlayer object you associate with the controller to disable external playback, but the view controller ignores this setting, very frustrating.

So I’m going to have to build my own player, really not that difficult, but will involve creating some icons, more code, time and testing, when all I really want is a facility to disable the automatic takeover of the external display.

I submitted a bug to Apple about it, but I don’t expect them to move quick. Obviously the AVPlayerViewController was designed to be easy to plug into your app, but the over simplification of the use case is annoying, if you have an external display connected, then you must want the video displayed on it. I guess with the recent addition of Picture in Picture, Apple simply only see special cases where more than one video could be played at once.

Anyway, couple of days delay, but the next update is coming along….

After a bit of a tour of Switzerland in the hot weather last week, I’m back working on the next release. This one will remove the stock photo and video picker and replace it with a custom version that won’t mess with connected displays, and maybe offer extra features in the future. It’s almost done already, so I might fit in a few other enhancements, should have a release for the end of the week.

Going to be on a break for the next week or so.