How cool is this.
Catalyst after one year
Next week it’s time for WWDC 2020, which marks the 1 year anniversary of Catalyst. A good time to look back at what it has brought us, which I’m gonna do in this pretty long post. Lets start by looking at what Apple is promising with Catalyst: Now it’s incredibly simple to start building a…
Stream to device
I’ve been postponing it forever, but now it’s going to happen: stream from your mpd player directly to Rigelian. Off course this will support background play, and it will be available on both iOS and macOS. The basics are working (enjoying Brian Fallon as I type this), now I need to incorporate it nicely into…
The first version of Rigelian for macOS was basically just the iPad version. The next step is to give it more of a macOS feeling, which is coming along nicely as can be seen in this screenshot.
For the macOS version of Rigelian I wanted to move the list of players into the main menu. Because those are detected on the fly (and players can come and go) this requires that the menu can be updated dynamically. Turns out this is possible through builder.system.setNeedsRebuild(). The following code snippet from my AppDelegate shows…
Trouble with armv7 support
Rigelian supports iOS 10 and above, meaning it can run on some 32-bit devices (iPhone 5 & 5c, iPad 4th generation). For that in the build settings you need to target both armv7 and arm64. Unfortunately with the default build settings, the app will crash on these older devices if loaded through the AppStore. When…
Rigelian goes Mac
I just submitted v1.0 of Rigelian for Mac for App Store review. In the last couple of days I finished the main changes needed for this MVP. The most important open topic was sharing a single Rigelian subscription across 2 platforms (iOS and Mac). With Xcode 11.4 this is finally made possible, unfortunately this version…
Dynamic type across the board
In preparation of the Catalyst version of Rigelian I have been increasing the font-sizes on most views, and using dynamic type on almost all views. An added bonus is that this will take into account the system wide font size setting that a user has chosen, thereby making the app more usable for those with…
In some of the recent updates of Rigelian there have been bugs that really should have been caught before releasing, but slipped through because of a lack of automated tests. Therefor I revisited the test strategy. In the past I created some ui-tests, but they were relying on a local mpd player that was started…
The next version of Rigelian integrates with last.fm to bring biographies and similar artists to the artist view. Coming soon to the App Store.