Finally! The Windows 8 VLC player app is coming along rather nicely. The beta version of the app is said to be offered to Kickstarter backers sometimes this month.
You may recall that the developers held a little Kickstarter campaign back in December last year to help fund a Windows 8 app of the insanely popular VLC media player. It ended successfully with the team raising slightly over $76,000 for the project.
We have not heard much from the developers since, except for a solitary status update.
Now, with more than two months after the end of the fundraising campaign, the folks over at Neowin recently pinged with the team to check on the status. Here is what they heard back:
“So, the development is still under heavy work. So far, we have playback of all the files of the desktop version, in a correctly performing way, without too much speed drawbacks. The basic UI is working, but a lot of work is yet to be done there, like on Android, to polish it 🙂
As far as the main work, which is to make it compatible with the Windows Store restrictions, we are still blocked by technical difficulties and we don’t know how to fix them, and the lack of external help makes it quite difficult. We probably will send a beta to our backers, this month, as we had promised.”
So basically, the developers are hard at work coding it, though the good news is that they have got most everything in working order. The design and user interface comes into focus now — and ultimately it is a very important part of the puzzle. Let’s see what the team cooks up on the design front.
Other than that, the backers getting early access to the beta version is great news, it appears that the team still has to work around the restrictions placed by Microsoft for its Windows Store.
A high-profile project like this deserves some attention from Redmond itself, truth be told.
