Remote Buddy and Boxee, Plex and XBMC

February 7, 2009 - Filed in Mac Development by Felix

Since yesterday, a new Behaviour for Plex (v0.7.6 or later required) is available via the Online Updater. It joins the new Behaviours for Boxee and XBMC, both of which have already been included with Remote Buddy 1.11.5.

A new generation of Behaviours for Boxee, Plex and XBMC

In the past, the Behaviours used keystrokes to control the three media center applications. While usually this is a robust way to control this type of application, it turned out to not be suitable here for a number of reasons. For example Boxee's onscreen keyboard can't be controlled at all via cursor (or any other) key presses. Likewise at least some of the functionality that is part of the three media center apps isn't available via keystrokes. That of course is perfectly reasonable. Yet, users that need that functionality - or who have a different idea of what the key bindings (keymap.xml) should look like - heavily customize them. That often moves functionality from the default keys to other keys and renders pre-defined keystroke actions in the Behaviours defunct. The amount of different keyboard layouts in the world doesn't exactly help, either.

To avoid all of these problems, the new Behaviours no longer use keystrokes to control Boxee, Plex and XBMC. Instead, the new Behaviours formulate and send button and action events directly to the media centers' built-in UDP event server. Essentially this means that media center actions can now be triggered directly by Remote Buddy. And the new Behaviours make plenty of use of these new possibilities. They all ship with a big set of actions and sensible default button mappings for the Apple Remote as well as for remotes with more buttons (like the PS3 BD Remote).

Q & A

I'd like to use this opportunity to provide answers to common questions regarding the use of Boxee/Plex/XBMC with Remote Buddy.

Q: I was told that I can't use Remote Buddy and Boxee/Plex/XBMC together or that when Remote Buddy is installed, these apps can't get access to the Apple® IR receiver.

This isn't and never has been the case. Remote Buddy's unique Apple® IR Receiver driver is implemented in a way that makes it fully transparent to all applications supporting the Apple® Remote on their own. They can get an exclusive lock on the IR receiver even while Remote Buddy is running. And while Remote Buddy of course will be the first recipient of Apple® Remote button events while it is running, these button events can be easily passed through to any application listening for Apple® Remote events using Remote Buddy's Virtual Remote. The next question gives an example on how this can be used.

Q: I'd like to use the Harmony remote mode of Plex.

The Harmony Remote mode of Plex relies on its own, built-in support for the Apple® IR Receiver. It needs to receive native Apple® Remote events to function. Using Remote Buddy's Virtual Remote, events coming from the Apple® IR Receiver can easily be passed through to Plex. You do neither have to enable support for multiple remotes nor do you have to set up logical remotes for this to work. In fact, a few simple clicks in Remote Buddy's preferences is all it takes - all of which are explained in the commented gallery below.

Q: I read that I need to do a lot of configuration with Remote Buddy.

Remote Buddy ships with sensible default settings and has great support for Boxee, Plex and XBMC out of the box. No configuration is needed. But if you want to, it's of course possible and easy to do.

Q: Where can I find documentation on Remote Buddy?

Select "Help" from Remote Buddy's pulldown menu to view the documentation.

Q: My Mac® doesn't have an IR receiver, but it has Bluetooth™. Can you recommend a remote with many buttons?

You can find a complete list of supported remote controls on Remote Buddy's website. If you are looking for an inexpensive Bluetooth™ remote control with many buttons that is supported by Remote Buddy, the Sony® PS3 BD Remote (as pictured on the "Supported Hardware" page of the Remote Buddy website) is a good choice. Please note that due to the way that Bluetooth™ works, Bluetooth™ remotes draw more power than traditional remotes that use infrared (IR) or proprietary radio frequency (RF) protocols as means of communication. To save power, be sure to enable Remote Buddy's power saving options for Bluetooth™ remotes. More info on what options are recommended for the BD Remote can be found in the Remote Buddy FAQ.

Streaming, multiple AirTunes® speakers & more

April 24, 2008 - Filed in Mac Development by Felix

I've been listening closely to what features you wanted to see most in Remote Buddy's AJAX Remote. You asked for it, now you get it:

Remote file access ("streaming"): your entire media library in your pocket

This is HUGE. Using Remote Buddy's AJAX Remote, you can now access all files organized in the iTunes® media library of your Mac® and play them back right inside Safari™ on your iPhone™ or iPod® Touch (given, of course, that the files are in a format supported by these devices). That effectively puts your entire media library in your pocket. Accessing files over the network also means: no syncing, no 4/8/16/32 GB limits. All you need for this to work is the ability to connect to Remote Buddy's AJAX Remote through a sufficiently fast connection such as WiFi.

At this point, it's also interesting to look at what the mobile version of Safari™ is capable of. To my big surprise, I found out that it will not stop playback of audio files when you "close" Safari by pressing the button below the touch screen. That means that you can continue to listen to music while you work in other applications - for example Mobile Mail.

Safari™ also supports playlists of up to 256 entries. But there are still a few rough edges in the mobile version of Safari™: while the skip track buttons are displayed, they only allow you to fast forward and rewind the current track, but don't allow you to jump forward and backward in the currently playing playlist. Also the QuickTime® autoplay feature is not supported, which is why you have to effectively perform two taps before content playback starts.

Selection of multiple AirTunes® speakers and your computer's default audio out

Ever since Remote Buddy has pioneered the remote selection of the AirTunes® speaker that iTunes® should stream to, there was a number one feature request associated with it: support for the selection of more than one speaker.

Starting with Remote Buddy 1.10, you can do just that. Both via your regular remote control as well as through the AJAX Remote.

But there are more changes: in the list of speakers, there's now an (i) on the right side of the "Computer" button. Tap on it and you're presented a list of all audio output devices of your Mac®. Select a device to make it the default audio output device for your system.

The Remote Buddy 1.10 update is available immediately and includes many more new features in other areas.

Enjoy! :-)

On Picture Arena

December 29, 2007 - Filed in Status updates, Mac Development, Inside the company by Felix

Due to the lack of demand for Picture Arena and a much different market situation for photo management solutions compared to when Picture Arena had originally entered the market, I've decided to abandon all plans to develop new versions of Picture Arena for the time being. Picture Arena will stay available through the Picture Arena Website, so those in need of a license can get one.

I've not made that decision light-heartedly, but after carefully considering all of the pros and cons, I believe it's the right and only responsible decision.

There's the changed market situation (Adobe®, Apple® and Microsoft® entered the market), the low demand for Picture Arena in general (in 2007, less than 3% of the sales at IOSPIRIT were Picture Arena sales; development costs have never been recovered to date), the fact that no sufficient amount of time is available for intense Picture Arena development (all of my time is currently going into Remote Buddy's development and taking care of my obligations as IOSPIRIT's CEO) and lots of work would have to be done before new features can be added (stabilize the new core framework I've been working on for over a year, rewrite all user interface and database code to use modern Cocoa APIs and the new core framework - Picture Arena is all Carbon-based currently).

A lot of additional time and money would have to be put into the development of future versions, while it has little to no chance to sell any better than before because of the market situation. The problem with saturated markets is this: unless the existing solutions are totally miserable, you'll need to pump a lot of money into promotion efforts to raise awareness for your product. Plus nobody who is relatively satisfied / has arranged with what he has will seek for alternatives by themselves or switch from a solution he's already comfortable with using. In this case, none of the available solutions on the market are really miserable, one of them ships for free with every new Mac® and all competitors have a huge amount of money and manpower available to them that they can pump into promotion and development efforts. That's not exactly a good position to start from.

Some of you may wonder what has happened to Picture Arena since its last public release in November 2005. The answer is: a lot. I've developed a new, Cocoa-based framework that eventually should become the basis of future versions of Picture Arena. By now, it can handle all relevant color spaces (RGB, CMYK, ..), is fully color managed, offers fine grained control for loading, saving and manipulating metadata, completely abstracts the filesystem, is entirely thread-safe, integrates efficient APIs for working on image data from multiple threads at the same time, embeds a thread-safe SQLite-Cocoa wrapper, a highly efficient, transactional, but very simple database engine of its own, runs on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs, offers memory- and CPU-efficient links to Quartz, Core Image, ColorSync and more. I've also worked a lot on Picture Arena's user interface, localizations and the editing tools available in Picture Arena.

Yet, stabilizing that private build and bringing it in a state where a public upate can be created from it would still require a considerable amount of time. Please don't ask me for a copy of the private build, as I won't hand out software that has known stability issues. I have attached a few screenshots of the private build for public consumption, though. And while I won't exclude the possibility that I'll find the time to finish that last update to Picture Arena at some point in the future, I can't promise it, which is why, for the time being, officially version 1.3.5 of Picture Arena is the last release of Picture Arena.

While the development of Picture Arena has officially ended for the time being, the development of Remote Buddy couldn't be any more active. Remote Buddy has covered its development costs and generated profit since the day of its release and is by now the product at the heart of IOSPIRIT. It has brought IOSPIRIT an amazing second half of 2006 and an even more amazing 2007. Looking at the (secret) roadmap for 2008, I see frequent updates to Remote Buddy and a lot of extraordinary gems being part of them. The next update to Remote Buddy, which - among other things - features a set of completely new drivers and fixes the few remaining glitches when used under Leopard, will of course be a free update and is out soon.

Update: Since support for Picture Arena is no longer available, its sale has been discontinued.

LSRefresh - a simple solution to Launch Services related problems

October 10, 2006 - Filed in Mac Development by Felix

Some users have had problems to get Remote Buddy recognize all of their installed applications. Since my philosophy and thus the philosphy behind Remote Buddy is to achieve elegance through simplicity and deliver a "it just works" out-of-the-box experience, the natural choice is to present a slick menu without any dead and unnecessary entries (i.e. for those applications, that are not installed). To achieve this - and to find all installed apps no matter where they are located - Remote Buddy makes use of Launch Services.

Now what is Launch Services?

Launch Services is responsible for launching applications, URLs and documents. It knows, which application can handle which kind of data and files, provides the choices for the Finder's "Open with" menu and can return all kind of useful information on a file or bundle.

Now, if an application is not added to Launch Services database properly (or the information stored on it is outdated), this can have all kinds of weird side effects:

• Documents can not be opened with a double click or are represented with a blank icon in the Finder.
• Similiar as above but with newly supported or no longer supported document formats after the installation of a new release of an application.
• Applications can not be found.
• ..

Usually the Finder should add or update new applications in the Launch Services database, but it doesn't always do so. And there's no convenient way I know of to manually update the entry of an application in Launch Services.

So I decided to sit down a couple of minutes and write a tool that achieves exactly this. Once started, all you have to do is select the app(s) whose Launch Services database entry you want to update. It's name is LSRefresh - and it'll help you out with most Launch Services originated problems.

Special note for Remote Buddy users: Be sure to restart Remote Buddy after you have performed updates for applications that were not found previously. That's because Remote Buddy does only look for applications during startup to save CPU time lateron.

Anyway, here's the download. Enjoy!

	Filename	LSRefresh10.dmg	Description LSRefresh 1.0 Application
	Filesize	250 KB
	Last modified	07.01.2007 02:13:39
	Download

[Update 07/01/2007]: For the technically interested: you can download the sourcecode complete with Xcode project here:

	Filename	LSRefresh_Sourcecode.zip	Description LSRefresh 1.0 Sourcecode & Xcode Project
	Filesize	46 KB
	Last modified	07.01.2007 02:14:24
	Download