VLC for iOS - Retro March

Another month has passed and it’s time to sum up the biggest changes and developments and share what we envision for the future!

- Continous integration on every Pull Request!

This helps us to catch breaking changes before they make it into the code base. Additionally to building iOS and tvOS we want to integrate the tests that David and Mike are now working on. If you’re adding new featues and don’t want them to break, I’d like to point to the words of Beyonce "if you like it, then should’ve put a test on it!" ;) 

- New User Interface

The first mayor change has landed in Master 🎉 Thank you all so much for the valuable feedback! It made the first PR so much better. The first follow up tickets have been created here: new UI tickets. This is not an exhaustive list and I would encourage everyone to add to it, in case I missed something. We’re still iterating over the UI but if the tickets are not making sense you should take a look over to Figma which is where Louis has moved the Design now 

- Pull Request Template and Linter

We’re growing as team, which adds the challenge of keeping a unified code style and convey the necessary checks when you contribute changes. Therefore David is working on a Template and linter to help with this

- Automatic Screenshotting

VLC has been translated to over 20 languages and works on more devices than most other media players! With the upcoming changes of the UI arises the need of updated screenshots on the Appstore. Doing this by hand would be a time consuming and tedious task. By adding Automatic Screenshotting we ensure translated and up to date screenshots with every release, a task that Mike is finishing up currently

- Chromecast and 360 video

As mentioned in the mail before, Soomin is working on the Chromecast integration and I started adding to the existing 360° videos. Both of these features will be part of the upcoming 3.1 release for iOS which is currently scheduled around the beginning of May.

Looking at reviews on the App store and feedback from the videolan Forum the most pressing three issues are:

- missing Chromecast integration

- no ability to sort, outdated UI

- Issues with disappearing files and folders

We’re in the process of addressing the first two right now but struggle with the last one. If anyone is able to reproduce or fix that ❤️ much love will be send your way from all our users. 

In general we aim at delivering an App with innovative features, an intuitive and delightful UI and bring the code base up to industry standard. All that so that we can lead by example and teach and share our work with everyone out there. With that being said I‘d like to highlight that respectful communication and collaboration with each other is an important part of this. Seeing this in every feedback on Pull Requests and message on IRC makes us very happy 😊