#app preview

just as promised, here are the application previews, serving as also a huge  thank you  for over 60 followes! we hope you are as excited as we are!!

hello ttg followers!! admin forest here to remind you that pre-reserves are open! see the previous admin post for more information!! also, don’t forget to post your intro in the tag~ 

now onto the fun stuff!! since we have a fair number of reserves we are going to give you a sneak preview of the app!! turns to god has a tabbed shipper app, so lets check it out!

I had read that App Preview videos were a good thing to have (here’s what Apple says) so I figured I’d try to make one for Off the Clock. After doing the research it seemed like trying to make the video from the iPhone simulator was going to be too much trouble, so I decided to try doing it using Apple’s recommended method - connecting an iOS 8 device to a Mac running Yosemite and capture video using Quicktime. 

I had been delaying upgrading my Macbook to Yosemite, but bit the bullet. I had done all my development testing for OTC on an iPad Mini 2, but wanted to make my video for iPhones, so I ended up buying an iPod Touch (5th generation) with a 4″ retina display. Following the instructions in this document it was pretty straightforward to capture the video. I had never used iMovie before so there was a bit of a learning curve there, but I was able to get a basic 30 second video created.

Capturing the video and making the movie were enough of a pain in the ass that I didn’t want to do it more than once. So for now, no iPad preview. I did want to support all the different size iPhones however, and just use my one main video to do it. 

iMovie appears to use the first piece of content added to the movie as the indicator of your video dimensions. Since I had used all videos imported from the iPod Touch, the output video from iMovie was 640x1136. According to this chart that would work for 5 series phones, but I would need different dimensions for 6 and 6+. I did some quick searching and found this post on StackOverflow with a tip for using ffmpeg to create other size videos. So I exported the video from iMovie as a high quality file and then used ffmpeg to create the 750x1334 and 1080x1920 versions of the video, and they looked great since they’re all the same aspect ratio. (If you don’t have ffmpeg, on a Mac install Homebrew and then use it to install ffmpeg)

If you try to use the same commands to create a 4:3 video for iPads, it’ll come out all distorted. I’m sure someone smarter than me could figure out how to make it maintain the original aspect ratio and just put black bars on the sides, but it seems like it would be better to create a native iPad video. 

Google Play lets you put in the URL to a YouTube video for your listing there, so I uploaded my video to YouTube and put the URL into the store listing. When I checked it on device though, only the left half of the video was showing. WTF? Apparently others have had the same problem. I followed the advice in this answer and uploaded the new video to YouTube and put the new link into Google Play, and now it shows up fine.

It’s no masterpiece, but it’s good enough for now! You can check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bul12DF3XfE