Brian Kassay

Version 1.4 was approved for both the paid and free versions of APOD Viewer.  Changes are:

• Added Multi App Live Tile. This option to the Live Tiles spans the latest APOD image across both the APOD Viewer Pro and the APOD Viewer app.  To do this you pin the ‘APOD Viewer Pro’ to the left, then ‘APOD Viewer’ to the immediate right of it.  Set both apps to ‘Multi App Latest Image’.  Within an hour each tile combines to form the complete APOD image of the day.  Much like Voltron.     This option is available in both apps be it free or trial, so all users will be able to do this. For example, the initial pinned images look like so:

      When the tiles update they will look like:

      Pretty cool eh?  Thanks to Frankie for the suggestion!

• Handled failed Thumbnail image downloads to revert to a default thumbnail image.  I haven’t seen it happen except for video links on their first day has not thumbnail associated to it.  Image links using the default thumbnail will have a correction attempted at the next app start up.
• Added ‘buy astronomy products’ link to the main page.  This is just an website Amazon store that I put up showing Astronomy books, magazines, Telescopes, and Binoculars.  This is just an experiment, I may remove this in a future update.
• Increased Favorites limit for free/trial versions to 8
• Removed locked Picture Buffer Limit for free/trial.  This is not working as intended, it may be removed in a future release.

APOD viewer 1.3 is now available for download/update.  The 1.3 version of APOD Viewer Pro got denied over the testers misunderstanding of how some functionality work.  I resubmitted it unchanged with some comments regarding this, so hopefully it’ll be approved before the end of the week.  Changes are as follows:

• Reverted back to the official APOD RSS feed. The previous one usually did not load the description and more importantly started to fail to load the images and titles correctly. This was due to the APOD site reformatting their html code. Fortunately the 1.2 version recovers from the image download location.  Once you upgrade to 1.3 the titles and descriptions will be corrected. Added bonus, the latest image will now change around 12am EST instead of around 9am EST.
• Added Mirror option in settings. By default the NASA site is selected, but if another country is chosen all thumbnails and images will attempt to be downloaded from there. Should the mirror site fail to download, it will attempt to download from the NASA site.  This will be most useful to people outside of North America.  Some people reported that the NASA servers would refuse to download at all on some days, so this option gives you download alternatives.  I wanted to add more mirrors but the ones that are in the list (Australia, UK, Romania, Russia, Italy) were the only ones that worked with all of the image types (thumbnails, standard res, largest res). 
• Thumbnail images are now threaded differently. Before the list of thumbnails would always download in the background, then update the viewable image if necessary. It will now only download thumbnails if it has not been downloaded before. The mirror will only be used in this case, so if it fails it will not update. Should this happen, select another mirror and restart the app.
• Live Tile updates will now eliminate the application name overlay.  So the tile will be the image and nothing else.  This was requested in a few comments, I think it looks a bit nicer too.
• Performance changes with the image caching.  There shouldn’t be as much of a delay when viewing an image and going to the website or hitting the Share button.
• Added YouTube links when the APOD image was actually a YouTube link. Pressing the ‘Start video’ button will bring you directly into the YouTube vid.