A new release: 3.2!
VLC for iOS is our port of VLC on the iDevices and has been around for quite some time, and is quite popular.
However, lately, the application development had a bit slowed-down and the interface was outdated. So, we decided to do a massive refresh on the code and on the interface.
Here comes VLC for iOS 3.2!
Interface
This release gives the first part of the interface refresh, focusing notably on the audio and video collection views.
The audio view features a full audio media library, similar to the Android version of VLC, sorting by Artists, Albums, Genres and so on.
As you can see, this is more fitting for modern version of iOS. In addition, you can see that the main menu has moved to a bottom tabbar, instead of the side menu.
The playlists have their own entry on the tab, with network (NAS, URLs, Cloud) and settings.
Dark/Light
Whether you prefer the dark or the light path of the force, we added both modes to VLC:
After?
There are still a lot of changes to be done in the interface, notably for the network section and the video player.
But we couldn’t wait to have everything fixed in a single version. Therefore, those views will be refreshed in the version 3.3.
Also, missing features will be added, depending on the user reports.
Under the hood
We focus on the interface, but in this release, a lot of the work was not visible, and was done to improve the code and simplify the future evolutions of the application.
First, as the name indicates, this release is based on libVLC 3, like the current desktop version.
It is not based yet on VLC 4.0, the development version of VLC, as VLC 4.0 is not ready yet.
However, a very large number of bugs have been fixed specifically for the iOS port of VLC, in the VLC 3.0 branch
Swift
The biggest change in the codebase is the move to Swift for all the new code added to the project, in addition to some migration from Obj-C to Swift for some internal classes.
You should look at the changes on the gitlab project.
MediaLibrary
The media management for this version of VLC has moved to the medialibrary project, written in C++, common to Android and iOS, and soon the desktop version of VLC.
This new library replaces the medialibrarykit project.
As it is written in C++, a wrapper for the medialibrary was created, in Obj-C, to be able to use it in our application.
Test it
Because of the large amount of changes, there are probably numerous bugs in this release, so please test and report, so we can fix it quickly!