SST Announcer

App Icon and assests update

This version includes a complete revamp of the app in SwiftUI by Eddie Inc. We introduce faster loading times, a better UI, more features such as notifications and custom tags, and caching posts.

Bug Fixes
- Fixed crash bug causing the app to crash on launch

New Features
- Redesigned icon

- Spotlight search support
- - Search and preview announcements using spotlight search
- - Tap on the search result to open it up in SST Announcer
- Fixed the bug which caused the labels on posts to be hidden

- Fixed bug where certain notifications would not be sent to the user
- Fixed bug where the content of the post would not show up on the notification
- Fixed bug which caused certain links to result in an error 404 screen. Now, those links just redirect to the Students Blog.
- The links and tags section now hides when in landscape mode to provide more space for the content

Announcer 11 is here.

- Dark mode*
Announcer now has dark mode! Experience dark mode on Announcer by turning it on in Settings app > Display & Brightness > select Dark

- Peek & Pop
Easily preview announcements and access quick actions such as Pin and Share

- Haptic Feedback**
We have added haptic feedback for certain actions and interactions within the app

- Filter Posts with Labels
Find posts using Labels! From Announcer, tap on the filter button and select which label you would like to use. You can also type “[Label Name]” into the search field for example, “[10th Anniversary]”.

- Sharing Posts
Previously, sharing a post meant sharing an entire chunk of text. Now, the app shares the Students’ Blog link.

- Notifications
Notifications have been fixed. You can now get push notifications for every new announcement.

- User Experience improvements
Scroll up to easily select the items at the top of the screen. No need to stretch to reach the buttons.

- Accessibility improvements
Made it easier to increase your text size by pinching and zooming. Previously, it required a double-tap.

- Colours
We switched from a Red theme to a Blue one to better match the app.

- Links
There is now a dedicated links section at the bottom of the post for you to select a link easily

*feature is only available on iOS 13.0 or later
**feature requires compatible device

- Accessibility improvements: You can now double tap the contents of a post to make the text bigger.
- Easier search: The search bar is no longer case-sensitive.
- Fixed notifications.

- Interface updated for iOS 11
- Pinning allows you to save important posts
- Stability and bug fixes

Bug fixes and stability enhancements via advanced multithreading controls

Announcer 9 - The final, necessary evolution

Our team worked day and night to bring you the final, long term version of Announcer, Announcer 9. We stripped out the unnecessary bits, and rethought the design through and through, and the final product - a perfect vision of design and code intertwined together to form the ultimate version.

Features:
▹ Out with the old, in with the new. We completely redesigned this app from scratch and eliminated the unnecessary bits. The app itself is completely rewritten from scratch, using latest SDKs and Swift 3
▹ "Read" ◉ indicators that allows you to view what posts you have already read
▹ 3D Touch peek and pop on iPhones for posts, so you can preview the contents of the posts by pressing harder on them
▹ Enhanced iPad support, with a beautiful split view that allows one to view both the posts and the contents at the same time
▹ Enhanced size classes support, which means better horizontal orientation support, and support for split view in Plus-sized iPhones, and full compatibility against future device sizes
▹ Enhanced Watch support for all those Apple Watch owners out there, with full loading progress indicators, redesigned interface and read indicators
▹ Improved reliability through stricter code checking and runtime verification

Announcer 8 has arrived
Advanced, uncompromising performance in a slimmer package.

- Fully updated for iOS 9 and WatchOS 2 (and yes, updated with Swift 2.0, which should hopefully bring about better code security)!
- Fully loaded for App Transport Security, which means (next to) all of your communications will be encrypted throughout with TLS 1.2.
- Slimmer app as a result of App Thinning, with only device-specific code and assets running on your device.
- Removed the About tab altogether (and moved the credits to the app's Settings page)
- iPad version fully supports slide over view AND split view for iPad Air 2 for better multitasking!
- Apple Watch now displays the correct date and time for post timings.
- Some under-the-hood fixes to enhance code security.
- Apple Watch can now browse Announcer without tethering to a phone, thanks to WatchOS 2!
- Increased code robustness of the Handoff mechanism.
- Fixed a small bug related to the Watch not loading names and other metadata properly.

Apple Watch & Extended Service Pack update 7.2:
+ Improved networking performance (by eliminating server availability check subroutines)
+ Migrated all content downloads to use only HTTPS instead of HTTP #securetheweb
+ More robust app inner workings
+ Apple Watch App now features a beautiful animation when you refresh the feed by Force Touching the main screen and pressing "Refresh", so you don't have to worry about when the feed actually finishes refreshing.
+ Fixed serious issues with the Apple Watch App (e.g. app not loading new content from web correctly)
+ Small UI changes to the Apple Watch App.
+ Fixed an important bug that concerns the date formatting in persistent storage (date is stored in the wrong format when Apple Watch tries to load new feeds)
+ Sorted Categories by alphabetical order
+ Some upgrades in some of the APIs used in the app

Previous changelogs for Announcer 7:

General stability update 7.1.1:
+ Most important update: moved all services to the cloud, so we don't have to worry about server outages!
+ Fixed an important bug with push notification handling (push notification fails to open on app).
+ Fixed a really tiny colour bug that may drive some people mad. (If you never used Categories then you probably wouldn't notice)
+ Fixed Apple Watch pre-loading functionality (articles can be loaded normally on first launch).
+ Improved Apple Watch readability by truncating newlines from the front and back of the article text.
+ Updated several APIs used
+ Feature: Opening app on Apple Watch also clears the badges on the iPhone app

**HOTFIX 7.1**:
+ Fixed critical bugs with iOS 7.1 compatibility (app wouldn't launch on iOS 7.1)
+ Improved overall code stability (improvement of data pipelines in app)
+ Better tab bar icon for Categories
+ (Hopefully) squashed the bug regarding UI animations with loading bars
+ Improved indeterminate loading animation
+ Improved telephone number and email link handling inside the article
+ Improved Apple Watch data pipelines for push notifications
- Fired DW to improve app and company performance

Announcer 7, the most advanced Announcer yet

+ Fully REWRITTEN in Swift, Apple’s new programming language
+ Ready for Apple Watch! Yes, Announcer is now on the wrist!
+ Far more rigorous code self-checking (as compared to Objective C) while running to keep crashes to a minimum (in other words, code like NASA!)
+ Cached feeds! You can read Announcer with no Internet connection
+ None-intrusive loading UI elements, so you can browse normally even in the middle of loading
+ Supports loading progress, so looking at a spinning pinwheel is a thing of the past!
+ Reduced network overhead by replacing XML with JSON in some parts of the code
+ Dynamic Type support, so you can modify the font size to whatever you like in Settings.
+ iPad landscape support
+ Better icons
+ Rewritten SIMUXCR Cloud HTML parsing system in Swift

General stability update 7.1.1:
+ Most important update: moved all services to the cloud, so we don't have to worry about server outages!
+ Fixed an important bug with push notification handling (push notification fails to open on app).
+ Fixed a really tiny colour bug that may drive some people mad. (If you never used Categories then you probably wouldn't notice)
+ Fixed Apple Watch pre-loading functionality (articles can be loaded normally on first launch).
+ Improved Apple Watch readability by truncating newlines from the front and back of the article text.
+ Updated several APIs used
+ Feature: Opening app on Apple Watch also clears the badges on the iPhone app

Previous changelog:

**HOTFIX 7.1**:
+ Fixed critical bugs with iOS 7.1 compatibility (app wouldn't launch on iOS 7.1)
+ Improved overall code stability (improvement of data pipelines in app)
+ Better tab bar icon for Categories
+ (Hopefully) squashed the bug regarding UI animations with loading bars
+ Improved indeterminate loading animation
+ Improved telephone number and email link handling inside the article
+ Improved Apple Watch data pipelines for push notifications
- Fired DW to improve app and company performance

Announcer 7, the most advanced Announcer yet

+ Fully REWRITTEN in Swift, Apple’s new programming language
+ Ready for Apple Watch! Yes, Announcer is now on the wrist!
+ Far more rigorous code self-checking (as compared to Objective C) while running to keep crashes to a minimum (in other words, code like NASA!)
+ Cached feeds! You can read Announcer with no Internet connection
+ None-intrusive loading UI elements, so you can browse normally even in the middle of loading
+ Supports loading progress, so looking at a spinning pinwheel is a thing of the past!
+ Reduced network overhead by replacing XML with JSON in some parts of the code
+ Dynamic Type support, so you can modify the font size to whatever you like in Settings.
+ iPad landscape support
+ Better icons
+ Rewritten SIMUXCR Cloud HTML parsing system in Swift

**HOTFIX 7.1**:
+ Fixed critical bugs with iOS 7.1 compatibility (app wouldn't launch on iOS 7.1)
+ Improved overall code stability (improvement of data pipelines in app)
+ Better tab bar icon for Categories
+ (Hopefully) squashed the bug regarding UI animations with loading bars
+ Improved indeterminate loading animation
+ Improved telephone number and email link handling inside the article
+ Improved Apple Watch data pipelines for push notifications
- Fired DW to improve app and company performance

Previous changelog:
Announcer 7, the most advanced Announcer yet

+ Fully REWRITTEN in Swift, Apple’s new programming language
+ Ready for Apple Watch! Yes, Announcer is now on the wrist!
+ Far more rigorous code self-checking (as compared to Objective C) while running to keep crashes to a minimum (in other words, code like NASA!)
+ Cached feeds! You can read Announcer with no Internet connection
+ None-intrusive loading UI elements, so you can browse normally even in the middle of loading
+ Supports loading progress, so looking at a spinning pinwheel is a thing of the past!
+ Reduced network overhead by replacing XML with JSON in some parts of the code
+ Dynamic Type support, so you can modify the font size to whatever you like in Settings.
+ iPad landscape support
+ Better icons
+ Rewritten SIMUXCR Cloud HTML parsing system in Swift

Announcer 7, the most advanced Announcer yet

- Fully REWRITTEN in Swift, Apple’s new programming language
- Ready for Apple Watch! Yes, Announcer is now on the wrist!
- Far more rigorous code self-checking while running to keep crashes to a minimum (in other words, code like NASA!)
- Cached feeds! You can read Announcer with no Internet connection
- None-intrusive loading UI elements, so you can browse normally even in the middle of loading
- Supports loading progress, so looking at a spinning pinwheel is a thing of the past!
- Reduced network overhead by replacing XML with JSON in some parts of the code
- Dynamic Type support, so you can modify the font size to whatever you like in Settings.
- iPad landscape support
- Better icons
- Rewritten SIMUXCR Cloud HTML parsing system in Swift
- Almost ready for iOS 9…? (Auto layout and size classes are go, and this app will not be “broken” by iOS 9 and iPad split-screen multitasking!)

Version 6.2 Bugfix-Enhancement Update:
- Got rid of the bug where the app doesn't load images properly
- HTML tables support (by loading websites with tables in a web view)
- Some improvements to readability
- Updated Safari-opening API

6.1 Minor update
- Improved reliability by updating some of the APIs used
- Improved stability of DTCoreText by truncating some junk HTML made by FeedBurner
- Added iOS 8.2 support by building the app on the 8.2 SDK
- Slightly better looking articles (removing of some of the redundant spaces between paragraphs)
- Bug fix for search
- Correct push notification badge count decrement
- Small amounts of code refactoring

6.0 Major Update (Push and other goodies!)
AKA The biggest thing to happen to Announcer since Announcer.
- Switched to a better push notification provider. Please start the app for at least once to register your device with the push service provider.
- Opening push notification takes you to the article directly.
- For the first time ever: NO LOADING TIME when loading an article.
- Beautiful new loading screen. No more dull greys!
- Fixed the date on every single one of the blog posts entries to reflect the time the post is posted in GMT+0800 instead of GMT+0000.
- Enhanced application stability (for the geeks out there: dispatch_sync on the main view is now fixed [uses dispatch_get_main_queue() instead], tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath uses TableCell init with UITableViewCellStyleSubtitle instead [previous UITableViewCellStyleDefault was wrong])
- Oh yes, did we forget to mention an updated icon?

5.1 Update
- Critical bug fix in iOS 8 push notifications. iOS 8 notifications should be delivered correctly.
- Better error tracking with Crashlytics so we can better improve this app in the future.

Major update 5.0
- Greatly improved stability over previous version
- Lots of under the hood fixes.
- Refined UI

The biggest thing to happen to Announcer since Announcer:

- Fully loaded for iOS 8.
- Fresh new icon.
- Optimized for the iPhone 6, 6+ and iPad.
- Uses StatiX Push, our own push notification system, instead of Urban Airship Push.
- Webpage loading now features a subtle loading bar.
- Opens links in an in-app browser instead of Safari.
- Faster loading thanks to dual core loading.
- Squashed a ton of bugs.

The biggest thing to happen to Announcer since Announcer:

- Fully loaded for iOS 8.
- Fresh new icon.
- Optimized for the iPhone 6, 6+ and iPad.
- Uses StatiX Push, our own push notification system, instead of Urban Airship Push.
- Webpage loading now features a subtle loading bar.
- Opens links in an in-app browser instead of Safari.
- Faster loading thanks to dual core loading.
- Squashed a ton of bugs.

The iPad update!
- Added iPad version
- Improved loading indicator
- Got rid of some bugs

Lots of improvements!
- Push notifications go away correctly after viewing.
- Improved loading performance for articles.
- Font size and spacing changes.
- Will automatically display the webpage if the article is not displayed correctly.
- Articles look cleaner.

Major update!
- Categories are now dynamically loaded.
- Major bug fixes.
- Improved loading
- Fixed crashes on bad connectivity