VLC for iOS - State of the Union

It’s been amazingly great to see how our team has grown in the past couple of months and the progress on all areas is outstanding! I’m pretty sure that not everyone of you knows about the details of the ongoing progress, so I'd like to share an overview that should help with seeing the big picture :)

Here are a couple of our greatest achievements from the past months:

- Louis started working on a stunning design for the new UI together with feedback from j-b, Felix and Soomin. This will resolve so many pain points frequently mentioned by users! (For those that don’t have access yet and would like to take a peak please just reach out)

- Soomin has written a script that is now used to automate the VLCKit building which has moved to a build server. This leads to consistent builds, less errors and a more efficient ways of releasing. Additionally he worked on the new Medialibrarykit which will be used under the hood with the new UI. He also recently started integrating Chromecast into VLCKit and now also VLC for iOS, one of our most asked for features

- Felix did some work on unifying the VLCKit buidscript to include MacOS, he also did a lot of janitorial work by getting rid of not used files and resolving warnings.He also brings visibility to the project by writing Blogposts about VLCKit and keeps pushing for more integration with libvlc

- Thomas our core guy resolved multiple crashes and issues with Audio, Video and everything close to libvlc. He also improved performance for Video- and Audio- playback .To highlight the biggest issues he solved: iPhone X crash, crashes with OpenGL, the app getting unresponsive after backgrounding and there is so much more.

- David recently joined by working on fastlane integration that speeds up Appstore deployments (yay no manual version editing and copy pasting to 20 languages).He also started adding a test lane and gives so much valuable feedback in PRs!

- Pierre resolved issues with our Plex integration and Network streaming.He also reduced a bunch of deprecation warnings, bugs and issues mentioned by users

- Mikes first PR just landed in our codebase to add scrubbing in the lock screen. He’s been busy writing proposals for the VLC GSOC participation and started digging into VLCKit to help with some long standing issues 

I’d also like to use the opportunity to introduce a common communication channel for external contributors and VideoLAN members. So far we’ve been using, twitter, facebook messenger, slack and email to talk to each other and I had to repeat frequently topics that concern not only one, but all of you. By introducing a common communication channel we create a faster way to answer questions and resolve issues, that each one of you might face!

The VLC way is to use and support open source solutions, in this case IRC on freenode. We created a subchannel #vlc-ios that I would like you to join. 

As Client Application on Mac Riot seems to be the best choice so far. If you get stuck and don’t know how to join please reach out! I have had trouble before (thanks @soomin and @felix for helping me)

Btw there are IRC - Slack solutions/integrations 

I looked into them but they didn’t seem very easy to setup (If anyone knows about an easy way, please tell me)