flingsoft

[flingsoft]

A slight change in direction, introducing Socialblend for iOS!!

For the the past few months we've been hard at work on a whole new type of iOS app for Fling. It is a slight change in direction for us, but builds on our fundamental understanding of iOS and our own personal experiences. Sometimes, the best ideas come to you when you are trying to solve the simplest problems.

It all started when our Head of Creative expressed the unhappiness of opening various applications to do the same types of tasks. In particular, waking up in the morning to open Instagram, to like and comment on things, and then switching to Facebook to like and comment on things, and then over to Twitter and so. From there we started concepting and it grew and grew. The fundamental idea was simple, what if we can unify these tasks into a single common view. The result is Socialblend.

Socialblend allows you to connect your Facebook, Instagram Twitter, and YouTube accounts into a single place. Socialblend is about media, especially photos and videos, and it is a consumption service so while you can like and comment, you aren't posting photos or status updates. It was designed to be a really simple and clean way to interact with your friends shared experiences regardless of the social platform they are using. And when you like or comment on something, it posts right back to that platform.

Our first release is just the beginning and we hope you enjoy it. We will be adding so much more in the future including deeper filtering, varying views, and even more services like Vimeo and Flickr. 

So give it a shot, its clean, easy to use, and best of all its free. Enjoy!

Download from iTunes

Oh and don't worry, we aren't done with video either... 

[flingsoft]

Hilah Cooking now available on the Roku!

We are super excited to announce the release of another amazing cooking show for the Roku. Hilah Cooking, starring Hilah Johnson, has been an online sensation bringing you short-form, educational, and occasionally hilarious cooking videos geared towards beginner and intermediate cooks, as well as people who are just looking for simple, low-cost recipes.

Hilah Cooking is available now on the Roku Channel Store (must be logged in) for FREE!

Enjoy the channel!

[flingsoft]

Superman Classics now available on Roku, iPhone, and iPad

Today we are really excited to announce our newest application, Superman Classics for Roku as well as iPhone and iPad. The application features all 17 of the original 1940s Fleischer and Famous Studios animates series and are well regarded as some of the best examples of early rotoscoped animation. Additionally, the first episode was nominated for Academy Award for best Short Subject in 1941, and only lost due to the appearance of a little orange dog named Pluto from Walt Disney.

Superman Classics is available now on the Roku Channel Store (must be logged in)  for the one-time fee of $.99 and also available on iPhone/iPad in one application for only $.99.

We hope you like it!

[flingsoft]

Jonathan Bird's Blue World now available on the Roku!

We are happy to announce another great new Roku channel that was developed in conjunction with our friends at Jonathan Bird's Blue World. Jonathan Bird's Blue World is an educational family-oriented underwater adventure series hosted by dynamic naturalist and underwater photographer Jonathan Bird.

Jonathan Bird's Blue World is available now on the Roku Channel Store (must be logged in) for a low price of only $1.99 a month and you get access to 3 full seasons. 

Enjoy!

[flingsoft]

“Daily Grape” with Gary Vaynerchuk just released on the Roku!

Today we are super excited to announce the availability of Gary Vaynerchuk's incredible daily wine show, Daily Grape, for the Roku. The successor to Wine Library TV, Daily Grape provides over 80 episodes of reviews and insight with its always amazing. We have always been huge fans and while he is no longer broadcasting (we wish he was), we have teamed up with VaynerMedia to make sure the content is still accessible to everyone. 

The channel is free for everyone, so if you have a Roku then make sure you check it out!

[flingsoft]

Delicious TV's “Totally Vegetarian” now available on the Roku!

It is with great pleasure that we introduce another great new Roku channel that was developed in conjunction with our friends at Delicious TV. Totally Vegetarian with Toni Fiore brings deceptively delicious vegetarian meals onto your Roku device and makes it simple for everyone to produce amazing food in their own kitchen.

We are also huge fans of Toni's mantra - "Buy Locally, Eat Seasonally, Buy Organic, Use Your Intuition, Everything In Moderation". It is a show for people who love to eat and for those that want to healthier.

"Totally Vegetarian" is available now on the Roku Channel Store (must be logged in) for a low monthly subscription of only $1.99 a month. You get access to 3 full seasons and tons of great recipes. 

Hope everyone enjoys the channel!

[flingsoft]

New Roku Channel "Travel With Kids" Released!

We are very pleased to announce the release of "Travel With Kids" on the Roku. "Travel With Kids" is an award-winning family travel show that shows parents how they can travel the world with the little ones without breaking the bank or losing their minds. Its also great for the kids as they can experience what its like to travel and see all the great things there are to experience out there. From Europe to South America to the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, they have traveled around the world and bring you some amazing creative ideas and stories.  

Using Fling Soft's video architecture we were able to rapidly deploy an entire custom application within a minimal timeframe for the "Travel With Kids" team and we are really excited about the result. As a father of two little ones myself and an avid traveler, I can personally say I am super excited about bringing this to market and can't wait for people to check it out.

"Travel With Kids" has won numerous awards including multiple Tellys, a KidsFirst! award, Dove approval, and iParenting Media Award and many more. You can find out more on their website, check out their blog, or find them on Facebook. 

"Travel With Kids" is available now on the Roku Channel Store (must be logged in) for a one-time fee of $4.99. You get access to all 4 seasons and new seasons as they become available.

[flingsoft]

Our newest app, Classic Westerns, now available everywhere!

We are very pleased to announce that our newest app, Classic Westerns, is now available across multiple devices including the iPhone and iPad. Movie Vault users have been asking us for a while to come up with inexpensive pre-sorted versions and everyone loved our last genre specific version, House of Horrors, so we wanted to add to the collection. With this release, we expose a great selection of classic films featuring incredible western actors like John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Tim McCoy, Gene Autry and more! 

You can install it now on:

iPhone ($.99)

iPad ($1.99)

Android ($.99)

Roku ($1.99)

Windows Phone 7 ($.99) Coming Soon, in review now!!

We hope you enjoy and can't wait for our upcoming releases!

[flingsoft]

Movie Vault now on Windows Phone 7!

We are pleased to announce that Movie Vault is now available on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace for $1.99. After much hard work, we are happy to see our app within the beautiful WP7 user experience. It has all the same great features and content as the other platforms, but takes advantage of the WP7 smooth Panorama controls giving it a nicely integrated feel. We would love to hear feedback and hope users enjoy!

[flingsoft]

Movie Vault for Android 1.0 Release Notes

We are really pleased to announce today our first release of Movie Vault on the Android Market. After months of development, we are proud to have an Android specific version of our application that takes advantage of many Android specific features as well as being (we think) mighty handsome.

Movie Vault for Android includes all the great features of its iOS counterparts:

Over 1,000 classic films featuring tons of great actors.

Fully search-able meta data direct from IMDB. You can also tap the IMDB logo to jump right over to the full detail page.

Movie reviews listed for all titles when available.

Updated from the server side, so you get new content as its available.

One-time purchase and then use it as much as you like. No recurring fees.

Movie Vault for Android is $1.99 and available in the Android Market and coming soon to the Amazon Appstore. 

[flingsoft]

Details about our new logo and website!!

Today we are pleased to show off our new logo and our updated website. We all felt the logo was definitely in need of an overhaul and we think the new version is a lot more fun and of course, a little retro. We also dropped the "Soft" from our public name in favor of Fling simply because it exemplifies an attitude and a feeling we strive to bring to our apps.

The site also needed some help and we really wanted to prepare for the release of our upcoming Android, Windows Phone 7, and OS X versions. So now you get a sneak peek of whats on the way and a super clean look and feel.

We hope you enjoy!!

[flingsoft]

Thoughts on Mobile Application QA and Testing

As we wait for the imminent release of Movie Vault 1.2 on the iPhone and 1.3 on the iPad (which both add AirPlay!!), I thought I would offer up some information on the devices and testing we do for the various applications. We are also avidly working on Android, OS X, and Windows Phone builds which should be showing their faces very soon!

Most development teams do not have access to a wide array of devices, so they are forced to depend on the simulators that are included with the SDKs or great third party services like DeviceAnywhere. While most of these are really good ways of testing (and we use them in addition to the devices), we do notice that you can miss a lot of if you rely of them solely. So we have a nice stable of devices thanks to our partners and we are growing it rapidly. Here's a shot of some of them:

We test on the following for iOS:

iPhone 4

iPhone 3GS

iPhone 3G

iPhone Classic

iPad

iPad 2 (coming soon, still in line!)

For Android, we test on:

Motorola Droid 2

Motorola Cliq

Motorola Backflip

Adding more soon!

For Windows Phone 7 we test on:

Samsung Focus

HTC coming soon!

For IP TV boxes, we test on:

Boxee

Roku HD

Roku XD|S

Some issues:

To start, it is very difficult to test memory leaks and memory related crashes through only the simulator. Whatever the reason is, the simulators seem to not exhibit similar leak behaviors. I can run an app for hours in the simulator and then put it on the device and kill it in 10 seconds. 

Next, UI interaction... you know the jumpiness/smoothness factor. Because the simulator takes into account system processing power things always feel crisp. Not so on the device and especially when you go between versions (iPhone 3G to 3Gs to 4 for example). DeviceAnywhere also has issues here because it is network based so sometimes it can feel jumpier than it might actually be. Two heavy extremes.

Video and this is obviously where we want to shine. We would never use a hosted service to test this and the simulator in most cases can't even run video well. We can test our streams outside of the app for general functionality, but we always like to try them on device to make sure it looks the best it can given our original source.

General usability is the best use of these tools and where they accelerate development. If you want to see how things look and how interaction functions, then they can drastically speed things up. 

I won't delve into the actual QA process, but we are very engineering oriented so we go through QA cycles, bug review, fixes, re-test, etc, etc. I can always talk to our process here in detail as well if anyone is really truly interested. I hope everyone enjoyed this and we always welcome comments and questions. Always happy to help and share our experiences.

[flingsoft]

Movie Vault 1.2 for iPad Release Notes

Movie Vault 1.2 for iPad went live today in the App Store and we are really pleased to make available some a great new feature, My Queue. A ton of users have been asking for it and after some work, we now have added it. It is super simple to use as well, simply select a movie and then under the Watch Movie button you will find a button labeled Add to Queue. Click it and it will be added to your queue which is then accessible via the My Queue button in the top left.

With that said, here are the release notes:

Updated user interface graphics, much better quality we think.

My Queue feature added due to popular demand.

Lots of stability improvements to handle memory issues.

Added Flurry Analytics for data reporting.

We have to say that Apple turned this review around faster than ever before and we are really happy with how responsive they have been. We are looking forward to 4.3 and adding AirPlay so when it comes out make sure you download so we can get to work on the next release!

[flingsoft]

What's Next for Movie Vault and Fling Soft?

The better question is probably what's next for Fling Soft, but I wanted to give everyone a quick glance at what we have in store in the coming months. As some may know, we recently launched our Roku app and this is really just the start of our expansion onto other platforms. Here is the tentative roadmap and what we are working towards due to user feedback:

Mac OS X

Android 2.2+

Windows Phone 7

Blackberry Mobile

Blackberry Playbook

On top of this, we are also working on updates to Movie Vault for iPhone and iPad. We are focusing on stability and the addition of Airplay support as well as expanding our content library. We think we will be close to updates in the next 30-45 days depending on Apple's OS release schedule.

Also, we have something big in the works that we are keeping under wraps until we get things finalized. Stay tuned!!!

[flingsoft]

Movie Vault now available on Roku!!

We are pleased to announce that Movie Vault is now available on Roku. This is something that has been in the works for a while and before we go into whats including and whats coming, I wanted to give a little personal insight on this lovely little box.

I have personally owned a Roku since almost day one. All it really was in the beginning was a way to stream Netflix content and soon took a back-burner to the Xbox, PS3, Wii, and every other device that offered Netflix content as well. Over the last year, Roku has come on strong with a new focus on embracing developers, opening a true "store" system, and releasing three new models. Now the little box that felt like it was struggling has emerged as what I think is probably the best reason to cut cable on the market. With a low price point and super simple interface it is probably the most attractive internet TV box out there.

So what's included...

There are over one thousand movies in the library all available at no additional cost to you. They range from really obscure classics to great B horror flicks. Check out some great films from John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Vincent Price, and many others. All the content features original cover art and full listings of Actors, Directors, and Plots. Here is a sample screenshot of the video listing.

And what's coming...

We are quickly going to be adding a Search functionality to the channel and also moving to streaming to accelerate playback. Let us know if you have any ideas for new features. We will also try and keep content updated as we find new/great stuff.

So go get your classic movie fix for only $3.99 on your Roku device from the Channel Store now!! And make sure you give us a 5 star rating when you find you love it!! 

Update 1/30/2011 - Note that we launched the app at a $1.99 monthly subscription, but due to customer feedback we decided to switch to a one-time purchase model on Thursday 1/27. It seems like most customers didn't like the idea of automatically getting billed every month. Thanks for all the feedback!

[flingsoft]

Movie Vault on sale and selected to Apps for Movie Lovers!

Much to our surprise and excitement, the Thursday cut over in the iTunes app store showcased a new category named "Apps for Movie Lovers" and inside was Movie Vault. The iPhone and iPad versions were both named "App Store Essentials" and the response has been great.

In honor of being selected, we are discounting both apps for a limited time. The iPhone version is now $1.99 (down from $2.99) and the iPad version is $2.99 (down from $4.99). Please show your support and pick them up now!!

[flingsoft]

Movie Vault for iPhone 1.1 Released!

We just wanted to let everyone know that Movie Vault for iPhone 1.1 has been released into the App Store. The new version features:

Updated graphics to support retina displays on iPhone 4.

iOS 4.2 ready with AirPlay support!

In-app rating system, show us some love!

Flurry analytics added.

We are working on the iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G streaming issues people are experiencing, so please stick with us. The good news is it is all server side, so we will update as we complete the re-encoding process.

Enjoy!!