Hachidori

I hope everyone stayed safe and had a nice New Years. With 2021, we have some exciting things planned.

In 2020, we spent a good amount of time getting our apps ready for iOS 14 and the new Apple Silicon Macs. While it took two weeks to get our apps ready for Apple Silicon, it was relatively simple. I had to recompile all the frameworks and afterwards, we had a working Universal Binary 2 version. That took about 2-3 months.

Now, we plan on releasing a final version of Shukofukurou for macOS 3.4, which will finally have universal binary 2 support and some UI tweaks for Big Sur. However, more changes are planned as we are working on Shukofukurou for macOS 4.0.

It has been over two years since we last released a major version. The goal with 4.0 is to incorporate more UI additions in Big Sur, bunch of rewriting for the main interface window since it’s somewhat a mess, and list syncing. When 4.0 comes out, it will be a paid upgrade since it’s a major release, but existing users will be able to upgrade to the new version with a large discount as I plan to bundle the old version with the new version with a special pricing. From my understanding, if you own one of the app in the bundle, you just need to pay the difference in the bundle. More details on 4.0 will be shared for active Patrons along with test releases.

Note that 4.0 will only work on macOS Big Sur or later. The older 3.x release, which we will name as the Classic Branch will still be maintained for at least 2 years, but no new features will be added.

In addition, we need to work on an alternative to provide legal stream links in the title’s information view. Apparently, Because.moe stopped updating their dataset, leaving with AniList with a possible alternative. The only issue is that it doesn’t provide specific region availability. LiveChart also have this data too, but there is no accessible API or JSON file we can use the data from. However, we added LiveChart to the list of related sites for users to view additional information, including where to watch a particular show.

As for Hachidori, we plan to work on adding Emby support in the near future. It’s an alternative to Plex and some users have been asking for this. We will investigate how to add support for this in the coming months.

With that, we plan to release the stable version of Shukofukurou for macOS 3.4 later this month. Note that you can already use the beta version by going to its product page.

Now that the dust has settled, we have finally tested our apps on macOS 11 and it seems that nothing broke. However, we want to start working on bringing some of macOS 11 Big Sur new features to Shukofukurou for macOS. With Shukofukurou for macOS 3.5, we will be dropping support for macOS 10.11 El Capitan, which is more than 5 years old at this point and we do not have any machines running that anymore. New versions will require macOS 10.12 Sierra or later. We will also work to get Shukofukurou compiled for Universal Binary 2 so it can work on Apple  new chips. This mean recompiling all the frameworks to Universal Binary, which we will be doing for Hachidori as well.

For Shukofukurou for iOS, once we release 2.0.9, which will have some fixes, we will begin work on 2.1, which will have support for iOS 14/iPadOS 14 support. Note that iOS 12 support will be dropped in the future after 2.1.x and we will only be supporting iOS 13 and iOS 14. This is because I do not have any devices that have iOS 12, which makes it difficult for me to test. Once a test version is ready, hopefully when public beta testing is underway, I will make the 2.1 beta builds available on TestFlight for active patrons. If you want to test the latest builds for iOS, you can learn how to support our projects by going to the donation page.