Bad Voltage for iOS

Continuing the discussion from Is anyone making a BV Android app?:

I figured I’d give the iOS version it’s own topic.

I’m on hold for active development until I can get the funds together for the Apple dev account.

TODO

  • Make sure backgrounding works
  • Cache the episode list (instead of retrieving it every time it starts up).
  • Add a refresh to the episode list

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@Ld00d - if someone was to buy you an account, would you be happy to commit to maintaining the Bad Voltage app as a high quality way of getting the show and being part of the community?

If so, does anyone want to generously pay for @Ld00d to get an account?

I don’t understand, why do you need an Apple dev account to make an application? Isn’t it free for Android and Ubuntu Touch, I know you get a free SDK, what do you actually pay for and why?

It is not free to build apps for IOS - you have to pay to be a developer.

But don’t apple get a cut of the app anyways, and wasn’t there last WWDC basically “Now your child will want to make an app” freakin not if it costs alot of money compared to Android, Ubuntu touch and most probably Sailfish, I would have thought that apple would have preferred more developers, but putting a pay door right there is not helping anyone who could make a big application get in!
Oh well they’ve always been a walled garden!

Yep. Apple can be a real turd.

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Yes, I’m willing to make that commitment, but I hope to get the account on my own soon.

What you’re paying for is the right to publish to the Apple app store. Google charges for the same thing last I saw. What this does is require a certain level of commitment on the part of the developer so the app store can be cleaner.

I can develop and build all I want, but I can’t get the app on a device until I get the account.

If you charge for it, yes. This app will be free of course. BTW, Google takes a cut too.

Can’t we all?

Well I understood that, it was just the mix between, Charging to make and then they also take a cut that confused me, to me it feels like taking money from each app sold was enough and gave app developers more of a reason to develop for the platform, I guess the commitment aspect makes sense though!

fair enough, I just thought this was an apple thing and thats why I went in more guns a blazing, sorry and thank you ^^

Happy father’s day to me. I have the account. I’m working out how to get @sil a beta.

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With Android, at least you can install a standalone .apk on your real device, for free. The fee, last time I saw, was one-time only, and granted the right to publish the app in the play store.

With apple, what are you saying is that there is no way to install a standalone app? I mean, without getting root / jailbreak / anything fancy? I can understand the fee (even if it is not one-time only) for publishing it in the app store, but you can’t install what yourself produce on your own device, that you paid for…this is phone DRM for me.

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Apple likes to have control over the whole experience. That means not letting you sideload on iPhones (w/o anything fancy). While this is a bit of a drag as a developer, it’s a platform I like working on, and I’m willing to accept those consequences for now.

@sil: I’m trying to invite you to the TestFlight team. There’s a build up there for you to check out.

edit: I’m using the email address you have listed on your website. Please let me know if you have another one you’d prefer.

I don’t have any mail from you: email address is sil (a) kryogenix (dot) org.

You can install an app that you have produced on your iPhone without going through the app store. What Android lets you do and iOS does not is install an app that someone else has produced. Specifically, when you build an iPhone app, you can either tell it “install on only iPhones with these specific IDs”, or “install on any iPhone”. Ones that are “install on any iPhone” must be distributed through the app store. However, @Ld00d can ask me for my iPhone’s ID and then produce a build of the app which will work on that phone; similarly, I can build an app for myself and install it on my own iPhone without having to use the app store, which fulfils your above requirement. I just can’t distribute that app to arbitrary others without Apple.

I have sent a support email to TestFlight. When this is working, it should make it easier to get updated builds to you.

You can’t do this w/o the developer account though.

@sil thanks for the clarification, now it looks better. Can you list any number of IDs, or is there a limit? Yes, I know this wouldn’t be very practical, it is just a curiosity.

Well, so it is not better anymore…just a mean cycle :confused:

There is a limit – I think it’s 100.

This is correct. 100/year.

OK, I now have the iOS Bad Voltage app. First let me say: yay, iOS app, nice :smile:

And it’s pretty cool, I must say. Good work.

A few items of feedback for @Ld00d:

  1. I think the Bad Voltage header should be aligned so that its left edge matches the left edge of the show title (so at the moment it would line up with the S in “Shows Restraint”)
  2. I like the thin-line play/pause/stop icons!
  3. The >> icon I thought would jump ahead 30s or similar in the playback. It doesn’t; instead, it speeds up playback. However, nothing anywhere shows that playback is sped up; it just sounds weird. If you think that sped-up playback is useful (I never listen to podcasts sped up, although I know many do) then maybe a different icon would be useful, and certainly indicating somewhere onscreen what the current speed is would be nice
  4. If I play an episode, then go Back (leaving it playing) then go to another episode, all the icons are disabled; this means that I have to try and find the episode that’s currently playing in order to stop it. I think that “stop” should be enabled on all shows if something is playing, and mean “stop what’s playing”, rather than “stop this episode specifically”
  5. The show list only shows 10 shows (which I think may be because that’s all that’s in the RSS feed) but there are blank spaces below the 10 shows which can be seen and pull-scrolled to, which looks a bit weird
  6. You may want to remove the “Discuss this show in the community!” text from the show notes, or better add the forum to the app and then have that text open the appropriate forum post
  7. The fullspeed/halfspeed/fine scrubbing thing that other apps do is pretty handy, I think
  8. It’d be nice to get some indication of how much time there is left to play in the currently playing episode
  9. There doesn’t seem to be any lock-screen integration
  10. I have locked the screen (finding there is no integration) and then unlocked the screen and returned to the app… and now the episode is still playing, but the buttons on that episode are disabled! So I can’t stop it playing. I can’t see how to stop the episode playing without quitting the app.

Again, I should say that these are just feedback points, and the app’s started really well!

Thanks for the feedback @sil

  1. I tried to center this and failed, so I’ll try to align it as specified.
  2. Thanks!
  3. I thought of this as a fast forward like you have with music apps. If you hit it more times, it doubles in speed until 16x when it will return to regular playback speed. I can make those skip back and skip forward if that works better.
  4. There’s a Now Playing button on the top right of the main view. Apparently that’s not obvious. What I can do is separate the play controls into their own view. Then I can provide a way to switch playback to the currently displayed.
  5. Yes, the feed only has 10. Not sure why those blanks are there. I’ll look into it.
  6. The show notes doesn’t have a link in <itunes:summary> which is where that is coming from. I can pull from another tag and see how to get the link clickable. How about we add the forum to the app in a future version? I went on a search for a Discourse API and ran into this blog :wink: which seems to indicate I’ll need some special access.
  7. Do you have an example? There is a scrubber there.
  8. I will label both ends of the scrubber with played and time remaining.
  9. This should be working in the build you got.
  10. The Now Playing button on the top right should have brought you to the right spot. Maybe fixes for #4 will address this.