Month: February 2017

It’s a wrap!  Voyer 2.3.0 is headed into the store now.

This version has two major changes;

1. WEBM fixed!
2. User Interface improvements.

This UI overhaul, which utilises a slide in Hamburger menu to better use screen realestate and hide less frequently used menu’s while simultaneously giving better navigation visibility.

Let’s step through that statement.

For Mobile, the Board List used to be the first page you see.  However changing board is something rarely actually used compared to browsing threads and posts.  So it’s a fair waste to hold a whole page on it.

On Desktop, it’s a whole quarter of the screen for something rarely used!

By moving it to a Hamburger menu, it is mainly minimised.  In fact, when navigating by the board name (which are all 3 letters or less) rather than full title, you don’t need to open the menu to change board at all!

Simultaneously, it is always showing what board you are currently viewing which is great for navigation.

On top of this primary change, the lists of threads and posts are now pull down to refresh for updating and follows a well tried and tested user action.

And the other big news; WEBM is now playing on desktop as well as mobile!

You may have seen from my previous post that I actually had WEBM working some days ago, but it introduced some other issues, mainly changing the video source from one to the next didn’t work very well and it took me a few days to find a work around for that.

But now, it’s done.  This makes me very proud of version Voyer 2.3.0 and I can’t wait to hear your feedback.

Cheers,
Robin.

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Eureka!

After some days mucking about with the FFMPEG decoding and everything around it, it looks like he issue was solved by replacing the default media player element.

It is working like a charm.  Very happy with it and I can’t wait to share the new version (it will be V2.2.x).

Of course, progress isn’t free.  This media player doesn’t like having the playing media change… it works on ARM but in x86 it plays audio only.

I have made it work but not in a way I am happy with.  Once I Get that figured out the new player, with no playback speed or chipmunk audio issues, will be released to store.

Rob.

Only 2 days after mentioning my under development Pinterest app, Pinnie, another is released in store called “Piny”

Imagine that!

Now, even though Pinnie has been in store (but hidden from search) since November last year if I released it with it’s current name it’ll look like I copied it!

Awkward…

Anyway, I might sill release it publicly, but not for a while.  As the UWP gap has been filled (and it sounds like Piny is more advanced in features than mine by a few weeks, I haven’t downloaded it yet to see…) I’ll hold off and keep my focus on other projects rather than compete for the same space at the same time with an almost identically named app.

The positive release of Voyer has brought to mind my Pinterest app which I developed for Windows UWP (Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile) called “Pinnie”.

Pinnie was advanced in development, having abilities to browse your boards, upload pins, view pins, etc. In fact, it was not only created first, but Voyer was built from an early fork of it!

The only reason Pinnie never went public to listing in the store, was I felt a little disappointed in the API abilities published by Pinterest and I was not sure about if it would be valuable in the store.

You see, regardless of what the Pinterest web site and Pinterest’s own apps can do in the Google Play and Apple stores, their public interfaces available to the rest of us are somewhat limited.

For instance, you cannot search for pins, or even other users.  That’s a fairly important part of social networks to leave out!

The final straw to me was that Private/Hidden boards were not accessible at all.  Not even your own!

I should mention that I did contact Pinterest about this and they were wonderful. This is not a criticism of them in any way.  It is purely a value call on weather what’s available allows us to deliver a compelling user experience.

Luckily, Windows Phone (not UWP or Windows 10 desktop) already has a very capable Pinterest app.  The developer of that app must have put some serious time into working around this limitation in the public API which I was not 100% sure I was prepared to re-invent when Pinterest themselves were purposefully choosing to  prevent it. (Private boards are indicated in the API, you just can’t get them)

However given the positive response to the read-only Voyer app, maybe I was too harsh on the value of Pinnie.  Bringing a Pinterest tool to Windows 10, Continuum and Xbox One might still be helpful to people.