Nicholas Pike

Due to a request by Microsoft LIVE Legal Services, iXboxLive has been renamed to “Xbox LIVE Friends”, and even better news: is now completely free!

iXboxLive 1.1 has been submitted to Apple for review!  Many under-the-hood changes, and a ton of visual changes:

• Many crash bug fixes
  • Won’t immediately crash to the springboard if you have no active internet connection (iPod Touch users). This often resulted in your buddy list being wiped. This has been fixed.
  • Occasionally downloading avatar images from Microsoft would result in a crash. This should be fixed.
• Redesigned Buddy List and Details View
  • The Buddy list now resembles the style of displaying friends that Xbox.com uses! (Thanks Mike Jefferson and Erik Bye for your help here..)
  • The gamer details view has been redesigned by TOTUSHI. You can find him online here: http://www.totushi.com/. He is a visual artist that does excellent freelance work.
• Message Xbox buddy’s with www.xbox.com
• Online buddies are automatically moved to the top of your buddy list
• The application now does some under-the-hood caching of gamer tag avatars, which should result in better loading performance.

iXboxLive is also sporting a new Springboard Icon, designed by Erik Bye:

Time for some screenshots!

Wow!  I’ve gotten a huge response from the Internet about iXboxLive 1.0.  Over all mostly positive, but there are some big issues that I need to fix for the first update.

• I’ve fixed the crash that occurs when theres no active internet connection, which often resulted in your iXboxLive buddy list to be whiped out.
• I’ve hopefully fixed the source of random startup crashes.
• I’ve increased loading performance significantly.  iXboxLive will load its main interface and add buddys to the buddy list as their information is retrieved.  (As opposed to what it does now, and waits for all the information retrieval to be finished before displaying the main interface)

More info to come.