Notices

Hey guys... Sorry I have ignored you all for the past week, but after the sad news last Thursday I need to recover a bit. I'll hopefully find the motivation to continue with development soon...

Greetings from Ulm.

Thank you for your quick reply and clarifying answer

You're a Nokia developer working on Harmattan (and/or Meltemi)? It's indeed very sad news they're closing the office in Ulm. The N9 is just a great device, and I think the N900 was too. I had been thinking a long time about buying a N900, but thought it was too expensive. Then the N9 came, which I still thought was very expensive and I was thinking about waiting for one of the rumored Meltemi devices (because they would be more low end with a lower price). But now I've got the N9 I think it's worth every penny.

I've also started some reading on the code of the app and already did some small changes under the hood and have some more things I would like to change under the hood. When I finished some of them I will create a Gitorious account so I could send you a merge request for them. Or if you don't mind I will add the repo to my Github account (which I already have) and you can manually pull in the changes from there.

Don't take it personal, have been working for Nokia for about 6 years and really loved the company but then, 1 day somebody decided that my team wasn't needed anymore, without any thank you or hand-over period.
Have been feeling bad about that experience but the only thing I can say is, take your time to digest the news on a personal level. Nokia is just a company and their very human approach stopped sometime ago, as a Nokian you should know when that happened.

Anyway, your app is very good, your coding is very good.
Keep the momentum and think about your own future, the community will always have a supporting function so thumbs up to you and all of your colleagues affected!

Yes. I love my N9 too and I'll keep on using it for a long time I guess. It will take a long time until something such awesome will be made again.

If you want to contribute patches you should join #xbmcremote on freenode so we can avoid communication issues as early as possible and save you some time searching for stuff.

I have been discussing this with the XBMC devs, and it was resolved within 1 hour

See http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/13080

It is nominated to be included for the next 11.x release

In the meantime, I have applied the fix to the standard Eden build, and put the packages online here (amd64 only, sorry)

Great news

For me this is the most important feature because starting and manipulating the playlist now requires you to stand in front of a turned on TV which is very annoying.

i used to use Salling Clicker before with my T3 PDA device and you did not need to turn the TV on and be in front of it so i'm quite spoiled

Anyway - i hope it'll be fixed once and for all...

Many thanks for this program. It looks great and works great. I had been a satisfied user of vlcremote, sadly the newer versions of vlc seems to have removed the --http-album-art option resulting in a severe loss of eye-candy. For me Xbmcremote is an excellent alternative.

To those requesting mark as (un)read. I found the API to do it (yes, it's actually in the JSON API, hidden away in SetXDetails (where X is Movie, Episode, TVShow or MusicVideo) as playcount parameter). But as I've been working on the app for two weeks now every evening and mzanetti has still some merge requests to look into I'm going to slow down and am not going to implement it right now.

I've also looked at Kozzis youtube video of the remote app for some TV brand. And indeed the overall usage seems pretty nice and I've already got some ideas to implement this in a future version. I would like to add the keyboard as a second page, and as XBMC Frodos JSON API will support receiving every user definable action I would like to add some kind of user definable page with custom buttons, so you could make a page with your own set of buttons and actions.

XBMC Frodo will also get a lot better input support. It's going to be possible to send texts in one go using the JSON API. Also XBMC will notify all apps when the virtual keyboard gets opened. This will make it possible to automatically open the virtual keyboard on the N9 to type the text. The notification of XBMC also has a type for keyboard/qwerty, numeric, date, time, ... so this makes it even possible to display the right input type. Got already a proof of concept finished and gave some feedback to the XBMC devs to refine the API.

I'm also planning on doing some contributions to the JSON API of the PVR builds (from Lars op den Kamp) so the PVR related things can be handled better in the remote app (page with the numbers, program up/down button, channel listing to select channel from, recording listing, ...)

But nothing concrete yet on these new features and I didn't discuss most of them with mzanetti yet. They're just some ideas I've had on improving the app and they're still open to input of others.

Edit:
Seems like I spoke to soon about (un)watch as the needed methods are only present since the May git code which means it will only be present in Frodo.

Wow dude, 16 feature branches on gitorious! You sure are busy

I really hope mzanetti and you see eye to eye on improvements. I'd hate to see good stuff linger in branches without getting merged.

That said, I think it's important to keep Eden compatibility, since most users don't follow the bleeding edge. I assume the RPC interface allows you to query the version of the remote XBMC instance (which in turn could gracefully disable certain UI parts/select code paths if a particular version is detected)? Alternatively, the Frodo specific patches could be collected into a xbmcremote-next branch. This of course has a slightly different maintenance profile, but makes the changes less invasive on the 'stable' branch..

Sooo, as others start looking at my person clone on Gitorious I just did a little cleanup of the branches Some of them were from mzanneti, which were already present in the main repository and got copied over to my personal clone, and most of the others where already merged.

The only interesting ones which are still present are "keyboard" which is a small testcase to get the keyboard integrated with XBMC using Frodos new input related notifications and "item-state" which shows an overlay in the library when the item is currently being played (although mzanetti didn't really like my solution, but I think the feature will still be present in an upcoming version).

A couple of weeks ago I already spoke with mzanetti about Frodo support and although we didn't really come to a conclusion, at some point we most likely will drop Eden support. So there will be no "degraded" version for Eden users. Although I guess they would still be able to use a new Frodo based version, but that would mean they have some buttons and things which wouldn't work (non working keyboard and some buttons on the gesturepad not working would be most notable I guess).