Month: June 2018

How to post landscape videos to IGTV

Now that IGTV is released and it will make portrait videos more popular, there is the same problem that we had with Instagram Stories in the beginning.

There is no way to post landscape videos.

By default, it’ll be zoomed in and crops about 70% of the content. I believe this is not a good way to share your videos. That’s why I decided to make the app, Video Resizer for IGTV.  It is a really simple app, that helps you to resize your landscape videos into portrait orientation. It also has some features to select the background to a solid color, a gradient, or the blurred version of the original video.

First I thought if I center the videos that probably will be good enough but by checking the layout of the IGTV app, I realized that the controls of the application is on the bottom half of the screen, so if I want to share a landscape video on IGTV, then I need to convert it in a way to show it in the top third of the screen.

If you want, you can add titles above and below your videos easily within the app as well.

So far the app got some attention and I hope it will be the number 1 app for video resizing for IGTV. The truth is that the app is out for a 1.5 month now, but the video resizing is a really popular niche with lots of great apps and by advertising, as an IGTV resizer I think I have better chances than trying to be a major player in the bigger market immediately. Maybe later I’ll be able to move to other formats too. Btw the app also supports other formats so if you would like to resize any videos, it’s the perfect choice!

If you want to download it, in the app store by clicking here!

Podcast Preview – May Update

It’s a bit late because it’s the middle of June already, but I haven’t updated what happened with Podcast Preview in the second month of being out in the app store. There are two reasons why I did not write the update earlier. The first is that I am currently traveling in Bali for June so I’m not working that much and writing a blog post is not the most productive way to spend my time. This post will be a bit short and rambling because I just sat down to write it without a concept, so sorry about that!

The second reason is more interesting. It wasn’t a great month for Podcast Preview. The sales are down and the downloads are down too. It’s partly because I did not spend as much time on it as I planned and partly because a lot of competition appeared from nowhere, which I’m happy about it actually. I’m happy because it shows that there is a real market here and a lot of people are looking for solutions to this problem! But on the other hand, it makes my app harder to find so I have to work on this in the future.

So to the numbers:

I got $27.46 after Apple’s cut which is 21% lower than in the previous month and 153 downloads which are 8.9% lower than in April.

These do not look so promising but knowing that I had almost zero effort in this month on the app it’s not that bad! Especially knowing what happened in June already, which I’m gonna tell in the next update hopefully in two weeks! I’m uploading a new build to AppStore Connect today which will add a few new features and bug fixes which hopefully will help to convince the users to keep using my app after the first download.

So that’s it for April if you’re interested what happened in June, please check back in two weeks!