conath / frontrowtrailers Goto Github PK

Workaround: open Control Center and pause playback there.

App Store Review rejected the app because it doesn't do anything if launched while offline or unable to download the trailers. I suggest including a trailers XML file with the app for this purpose, and showing a more informative alert when unable to download the latest trailers.

Refresh once per day max.

On very compact (4") device, the "Studio" option doesn't fit on the screen but the picker eats the swipe gesture from the ScrollView because you can swipe to select. Not quite sure how to handle that.

The cover flow UI is unusable on iOS 15, using version 1.3.1 from the App Store. Apparently, something has changed in the way SwiftUI layouts the view and it now never settles on a poster - just scrolls infinitely. This surprises me as I didn't recompile & submit the app for iOS 15 API.

The Apple Trailers website provides 720p and 1080p streams via a quality selector, but no XML feed for 1080p files. So we need to find a way to determine the 1080p URLs from the 720p ones. Then we need to add this to the app and automatically load the 1080p version if available, else load the 720p one.

Currently, the movies are sorted alphabetically by title. It would be nicer if they were sorted by release date, with future movies first and past movies last.

Fixing this should only require changes to the Model/MovieInfo.swift file. The release date must be parsed into a Date object. Then, the movies can be sorted using the built in sorting function before they are returned to the SceneDelegate.

In the list of actors, some of the names have extra commas.

Add a share button that appears after a trailer has been watched.

This requires getting the URL to a trailer's webpage. Might be too complex, so might link directly to the trailer video file.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Launch app on a vertically regular and horizontally compact device in portrait (e. g. iPhone 11 Pro).
2. Rotate the device to landscape mode.
3. Tap < Theatrical Trailers and tap any movie trailer in the list.
4. Rotate the device back to portrait mode.
5. Observe the crash:

AttributeGraph precondition failure: setting value during update: 45488.

Workaround:

Exclusively use the app in portrait or landscape mode on affected devices.

Proposed Fix:

A: Separate UI

Create two separate Movie Trailer List views, one for horizontally and vertically regular devices and one for other devices. The one for other devices must not include a NavigationView to avoid entering a split screen navigation phase.

B: Altered UI

On horizontally compact environments, change the play Button to a NavigationLink that leads to a MovieTrailerView that auto-plays the trailer. This way, maybe the transition to split view and from split view can be handled by SwiftUI because now actual navigation is happening in both compact and regular environments.

Launch and loading screens should have the same dark interface style as the rest of the app.

The movie meta view currently moves along inside the ScrollView. Instead it should be its own (vertical) ScrollView and float centered in the view.

Could work like this:

ScrollView(.vertical) {
    VStack {
        CoverFlowScrollView($centeredItem)
        
        CoverFlowMetaView($centeredItem)
            .opacity(isMovieInfo($centeredItem) ? 1 : 0)
    }
}

CoverFlowMetaView would be a new view that shows settings and movie info as needed. The Watch trailer button would show the trailer in full screen (overlay) with an own close button (?).

This requires the CoverFlowScrollView's reflection portion to be layered behind the CoverFlowMetaView.

From this conversation I learned about AppStorage. It should be used whenever the Settings code is updated/rewritten.

As expected from my second SwiftUI project, the code can be improved in many places:

AppDelegate

Make AppDelegate @Published vars publish on main, e. g. isPlaying, idsAndImages.

Replace force unwrapped selectedTrailerModel with Optional. (thanks @sharedRoutine)

More generally, the AppDelegate is looking very much like a data source. All those properties should be moved to a new view model object.

The reason is that the CoverFlowScrollView always tries to center a movie poster, even if the user still had their finger on the screen.

A possible solution would be to re-write this behavior to only center a poster after the finger is lifted. Additionally there is currently a bit of a "dead zone" on between two posters where no poster will be centered. This dead zone should be removed.

This should be easy to implement because the functions to call are all already there.

Widgets:

• next releasing
• newest trailers, which means either highest id or furthest out release date

Maybe 'Secrets.swift' contains many secrets but ... for me, Xcode will not build the project without it.

The sound effects player in Theatricals seems to be configured wrong, as it interrupts playing media in the system media player. E. g. a podcast is playing and you open Theatricals. Podcast pauses immediately when the "click" selection sound plays.

The AVPlayerViewController in TrailerPlayerView doesn't show any error message, so we'll have to check for internet connection before showing it.

Seems like there's a regression that causes the widget to crash. Maybe related to the Telemetry I added to it.

iTunes Trailer Search is accessible via a simple URL scheme:

https://trailers.apple.com/trailers/home/scripts/quickfind.php?callback=searchCallback&q=the%20croo

Can you share some dummy secret class just to run this project?

thank you very much :D

Sometimes the trailers server seems to have a hard time serving the 720p files fast enough for smooth playback. It should be possible to find alternative servers, maybe also with a different XML source.

Some users may prefer to tap on left/right buttons instead of scrolling the list. The buttons could be made to appear after a few seconds after app launch if no swipes were detected.

When the app starts on iPad in portrait orientation, it shows a blank screen with the a "Theatrical Trailers" button in the top left. This is the default behavior of the NavigationView in portrait orientation, even with .navigationViewStyle(DoubleColumnNavigationViewStyle()) set.

To make the UX a little better in this case, there should be some kind of default view shown. Maybe even a Cover Flow style overview of available trailers.

Currently, the Cover Flow view is inaccessible on iPad. It should be updated to adapt to iPad screen sizes and enabled in MovieInfoOverView.

The XML file we rely on to load trailers seems to be deprecated and is no longer updated with new movie trailers. We need to look into alternatives, like the newer iTunes Trailers RSS feed.

The StoreKit API provides SKStoreReviewController.requestReview(). Some logic should be applied before showing the prompt. E. g. user has watched a trailer. This could be tied in with possible future telemetry data collection logic.

import StoreKit

/**
 Shows the App Store review prompt if appropriate.
 Appropriate means:
 - TODO
 */
class AppStoreReviewManager {
    static func requestReviewIfAppropriate() {
        let settings = Settings.instance
        // check if app was first launched more than one minute ago
        guard Date().timeIntervalSince(settings.firstLaunchedDate) > 2 * 60/* seconds */ else {
            return
        }
        // further checks, e.g. has watched at least one trailer
        
        // check that a no request for review of this app version has been made
        let currentVersion = UIApplication.shared.version
        let lastVersion = settings.lastReviewRequestAppVersion
        guard lastVersion == nil || lastVersion! != currentVersion else {
            return
        }
        
        // request for the review popup to be shown
        SKStoreReviewController.requestReview()
        
        // update last requested version number
        settings.lastReviewRequestAppVersion = currentVersion
    }
}

The above code includes a reference to the following extension of UIApplication:

extension UIApplication {
    /// Returns the `CFBundleShortVersionString` from *Info.plist*.
    var version: String {
        guard let appVersion = Bundle.main.object(forInfoDictionaryKey: "CFBundleShortVersionString") as? String else {
            fatalError("Couldn't find CFBundleShortVersionString in Info.plist")
        }
        return appVersion
    }
}

Remember which trailers have been watched

The list of trailers should be updated without interrupting the user, and it should update more often. Currently, it is possible for the widget to display more up to date info than the app.

The widgets are supposed to show a new movie each day, however that doesn't seem to be working as intended. The timeline provider code is likely where to fix this.

App Review noted that showing a full screen modal that just says "Loading…" on first launch is not a good experience. For example, if the device is connected to the internet but maybe slowly (like App Review is these days - working from home over a VPN!), downloading the posters will take quite a while.

Ideas for improvement:

• Launch app without any downloads, by loading the bundled XML from disk
• If online, get updated XML
• download movie posters at lower resolution
• download movie posters asynchronously on a separate global DispatchQueue (add a spinner to MoviePosterView to indicate loading in progress)

The list view is visually less appealing than Cover Flow and doesn't include all features.

Dependencies for this: Cover Flow must work on iPad #16 and VoiceOver support #26 must be added for Cover Flow.