Sunday, February 28, 2010

IQ+ Version 6 has been submitted to Apple

The RSS feed and landscape view changes are working fine, the app is now also more robust to timeouts and failures when calling into Netflix over flaky network connections.

Unfortunately I still can't make the underlying Netflix API operation needed to re-sort the queue work, and I'm going to debug that over the next few weeks and submit an update when it works.

Turn-around times for the App Store review process have been much faster recently, according to several reports, so we will see how long it takes.

Friday, February 19, 2010

IQ+ Version 6 is almost ready

Thanks to review feedback from customers, two features will be added. One is that the application can be rotated so that the lists are shown horizontally, and more text can be seen for each movie. This is useful for movies with long titles. The other is the re-instatement of the RSS feed of new instant choices as an additional list. There is less data per movie, so the RSS list display shows the synopsis in the sub-area under the title, and the only sort option is a title sort or the original sort, which is grouped by genre. Adding a movie from the RSS feed takes a little longer since the extra information is loaded at that point.

Some minor additional bug fixes and enhancements are that the number of movies in the Instant Queue is shown immediately on startup, and any lists that fail to load due to poor network connections will be retried without having to quit the app. The free trial button is changed to link via the new Netflix deal with the Google Affiliate Network program, as is the link in the blog border.

At present, I'm still working to debug sorting the queue and having it change at Netflix, and this feature may not make it into V6. Some of the views currently ignore rotation, so you have to rotate at the starting screen or go back to it to change from portrait to landscape mode. I may just leave rotation working this way...

I expect to submit V6 to Apple in the next week or so.