Its been a while since I last posted, as Ive been hard at work putting the final touches on the Playstation 4 app that I created for DramaFever!
DramaFever’s official Playstation 4 app is now live on the Sony PSN store and you can download and use it today for free! Check it out! Stream all of our content anonymously or register for a free account for more features! If you love the service why not go Premium so you can enjoy ad free tv and movies!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gfCzL_2qP4&w=560&h=315]
When I first was hired with DramaFever, it was with the intention of joining their “set top box” team and working on their next-generation app for various devices and consoles. This was really exciting to me! Within my first 2 weeks I had a working prototype up and running on a dev-kit PS4 streaming our videos and everything! (Meanwhile we were working with a 3rd party company that was heading close to over a year for our Xbox 360 app!) 6 months later my hard work has paid off and the app is live and a big success!
When I was hired, and during my interview process, it was made clear that Angular was the framework of choice for the front-end team at DramaFever. I openly admitted that I had no working experience with Angular and really never even experimented with it (I was a Backbone guy at the time, as you may recall). That didn’t seem to matter as I hit it off with everyone on the team and had a great interview. The rest is history!
My first few weeks were a lot of work as I spent every waking minute I wasn’t working absorbing as much information as I could about the Angular framework. Its really a nice framework and getting up and running was really quite pleasant. It helped that I had a solid team of rockstars to guide me along the way!
There were a lot of pain points I experienced during the development of the app. From dealing with a wonky UX where theres no mouse but a game controller, to integrating a 3rd party ad network stitching commercials into the video player, to building the custom video player from scratch itself! The end result, however, is something that I’m really quite proud of!
The app has already been submitted for the Playstation 3 and Vita (as all 3 share the same codebase). Additionally we are working hard to configure the app in a way that it can be supported across a number of additional devices and consoles (i.e. Xbox One and WiiU).