There are a couple of things in the Couch Tv 1.3 update that I am excited to share.

Redesigned video screen

The previous player screen looks similar to this. It is functional but could use quite a bit of love.

In 1.3 the video screen tries to theme the screen based off of the poster cover art

Moved the director and stars to the left of the poster image, which provided more room for long descriptions and titles. And the play button is what one would expect instead of a button that just said “play”. There is now a progress bar to show you how much has been watched of this movie. The length of the movie as well as the resolution is now displayed.

Deep linking and Top Shelf

There are two additional features that work well together. The top shelf will show you which movies have been viewed but not finished. Clicking on the movie will launch Couch Tv and play the video directly without having to go find the movie you were looking for.

This feature comes about due to my 2 year old daughter wanting to watch Frozen every single night and me and the wife wanting to save time trying to find it.

To enable the top shelf and deep linking features, you have to move Couch Tv to the top row on the Tv

Here is a quick video showing the newest features of Couch Tv 1.3

Thanks for reading

Shortly after writing Going from Couch Tv 1.0 to 1.1, Apple approved a bug fix update 1.2. fixes include better DLNA discovery support. Over the halloween weekend I was able to test the following servers successfully:

• Twonky
• Kodi
• Serviio
• TVMobili

Also included in this update are general usability fixes around playing videos and other small bug fixes. This release was reviewed and approved in less than an hour! If anyone at Apple is reading this, thank you for the quick turnaround!

As soon as Couch Tv 1.0 was approved by Apple, I started work on 1.1. What follows here are some of the major visual differences between the two versions.

While this works, I have to click into Video to see what’s underneath

So now I’m lost in a sea of folders and the text is really small. To address this, a spilt view is now used to separate the top level folders from their children

This works better because I can see what’s in Video just by launching Couch Tv. Clicking into “Movies” shows me a list of folders down the left hand side and either subfolders or videos on the right.

I’m curious to read any feedback, but I think this UI is definitely better than the one Couch Tv initially shipped with.