More Than Meets the Eye
2.0 was released back in mid December. The release was a 6 week effort to completely overall the UI. Today’s release was focused more on UI tweaks, bug fixes and universal app linking.
This Feedback is BAD
What seemed like over night, analytics showed that 2/3rds of iOS users are now on iPhone 6(s) phones. Two bug reports that came in on the same day made me panic. Users who were trying to do mobile broadcasts on a 6 or 6s were getting horrible feedback from the phone. I’m not sure if this hardware specific or iOS update that introduced regression.
In previous versions of the app, and lesser hardware, when a user wanted to started a broadcast I used the following configuration for the audio session:
[[AVAudioSession sharedInstance] setCategory:AVAudioSessionCategoryRecord error:nil];
[[AVAudioSession sharedInstance] setActive:YES error:nil];
[[AVAudioSession sharedInstance] setMode:AVAudioSessionModeDefault error:nil];
In order to fix the broadcasting feedback issue I had to override the audio output port like so:
NSError *error;
if (![[AVAudioSession sharedInstance] overrideOutputAudioPort:AVAudioSessionPortOverrideNone error:&error]) {
RTVLog(@"AVAudioSession error overrideOutputAudioPort to Reciever:%@",error);
}
Realtime Play Counts
Stats are not really very useful in a “snapshot” context. This release added in functionality that will update a broadcast’s play count in real time.
Up and Down
It seemed awkward for many users in the early days of iOS to “swipe” for actions, but over the past 3+ years Apple has been including these mechanisms in interacting with the OS and native apps (pull to refresh and mail controls). I added in swipe gestures on the broadcast header for up / down vote. The gestures free up real estate and feels more natural.
Custom Filter Control
I’m a huge advocate for using 3rd party libraries as little as possible in my apps, unless it absolutely necessary. There are tremendous number of truly amazing controls and libraries written by people smarter than myself, but I learn more my doing than copying. We wanted to move the “Live” and “Upcoming” filter from the drop down to above the lists and the user would toggle that way.
There are a million ways to skin that cat. I’m not the biggest fan the UIButton class due to all the setup, but using an interactive UIView didn’t seem the right approach either. I settled on just creating my own custom UIControl which was a fun little task that only took a few hours. Though it is simple to look at and interact, which was the goal, IMHO, the subtle animations and control states are what make it shine.
There is always room for improvment. If you have an comments or questions about features or bugs please email me at cory {@} rabble (.) tv