Fixing the Apple® Remote under Snow Leopard

October 23, 2009 - Filed in Status updates, Mac Development by Felix

As mentioned previously, Snow Leopard broke the built-in Apple® Remote support of most applications, whereas Remote Buddy, using its own driver architecture, was completely unaffected by this issue.

In the past few weeks, I've been receiving emails from many developers who were searching for a solution. Much to my regret, there was no simple solution to the issue. So I went to create one and - while I was at it - decided to also offer a solution to other open issues in the remote control support of many Mac® applications.

Today, I'm proud and happy to share the result of the past few weeks of work with you. It comes in the form of three releases:

Candelair

Remote Buddy's driver architecture let's it do wonderful things. One of these is the ability to emulate an internal Apple® Remote IR Receiver. In a nutshell, it allows Remote Buddy users (who know this emulation as "Virtual Remote") to use any hardware supported by Remote Buddy (f.ex. an iPhone™ or Wii™ Remote) and make it look like a real Apple® Remote to the system.

Using this emulation as a foundation, I built a clean, global fix for the Apple® Remote issues of OS 10.6 and 10.6.1 right into the latest version of Remote Buddy's driver. Once the driver is installed, applications can reliably access the Apple® Remote again like they used to - without any code changes (that doesn't mean, however, that developers shouldn't make changes - but more on that later).

Accommodating the relevance of this global fix for everyone with an Apple® Remote, I decided to make the driver available separately. Packaged in a preference pane for changing options and installing, updating and uninstalling the driver, it is now available as Candelair and can be downloaded for free.

I'd like to point out that Candelair's only purpose is to fix Apple® Remote issues in Snow Leopard. It works only with built-in Apple® IR Receivers and doesn't add support for additional hardware to your system. Candelair is not a free or lite version of Remote Buddy in any way.

For more information on Candelair, please see the new Candelair website.

HIDRemote (Objective-C class)

Most applications supporting the Apple® Remote today use code with a rather complex dependency: they rely on the particular internal layout of the HID descriptor of the Apple® IR Receiver driver of particular OS releases. This usage pattern has a number of disadvantages for developers and users, with the most significant one probably being that Apple® Remote support in these applications easily breaks with new OS releases.

Since this dependency and its effects are avoidable and there were more issues that I wanted to see addressed, I created the new HIDRemote Objective-C class for accessing the Apple® Remote under OS 10.4/10.5/10.6. The main goal during the development of this class was to maximize compatibility with past, current and future OS releases, emulators, remote control solutions, etc.

You can find the sourcecode, sample code, a list of features, a guide and developer documentation on the HIDRemote pages.

Remote Buddy 1.15

Last but not least, Remote Buddy 1.15 has also been released today. It includes the new version of the Remote Buddy driver and utilizes HIDRemote metadata to control applications for which a Behaviour doesn't exist, yet. For more info on the changes in this release, please see the release notes.

Snow Leopard compatibility, support for QuickTime Player X and a promotion

September 9, 2009 - Filed in Status updates by Felix

Remote Buddy 1.14.1 is out for roughly a week now and adds support for the new QuickTime Player X, the new 64 Bit Snow Leopard kernel and other, more subtle novelties.

Support for QuickTime® Player X

The new Remote Buddy version adds support for Snow Leopard's new QuickTime® Player. Apart from the playback control that you know from older versions, we've also added support for creating and controlling audio, video and screen recordings. To create a new recording while QuickTime® Player X is running, press "Menu" on your remote and select the kind of recording you want to create from Remote Buddy's menu. Then, press play to start recording. Press play again to stop recording.

Remote Buddy not affected by Apple® Remote issue in Snow Leopard

With Snow Leopard, the built-in Apple® Remote support of most non-Apple® software was broken. Users of affected software will notice that Front Row, iTunes®, etc. is reacting to button presses in parallel to the third-party application that's implementing Apple® Remote support on its own.

Remote Buddy is not affected by this issue. It continues to work reliably and in peaceful co-existance with the Apple® Remote functionality that is built into OS X. Remote Buddy has a clean driver architecture of its own and is implemented with best performance, compatibility and user experience in mind: no system files are modified, no system functionality is disabled and no hacks or patches are used. Not a single line of driver code needed to be changed to achieve Snow Leopard compatibility.

So, if you're affected by the Apple® Remote issue in Snow Leopard and you're looking for a solution, look no further and give Remote Buddy a try. We've got a 30 day trial version available and you can download it for free!

If you're an application developer in search for a solution for your own application, please get in touch.

Remote Buddy turns 3 years, 3 months and 3 days today

Today, on September 9th, '09, three years, three months and three days have passed since Remote Buddy was first released on June 6th, '06.

A huge thank you goes to all who've supported the development of Remote Buddy with their purchase, feedback, contributions and enthusiasm. Remote Buddy wouldn't be where it is today without you!

In celebration of today's anniversary, there's a promotion in the IOSPIRIT Online Store: enter the promotion code HAPPYBIRTHDAY into the shopping cart to save 5.55 Euro (that's 27%) on the purchase of one Remote Buddy single user license. The promotion runs until September 12th, 2009.

AJAX Remote after "Remote"

July 11, 2008 - Filed in Status updates, Shared thoughts by Felix

As you've likely read in the news, Apple® just released their own native iPhone™/iPod® Touch application called "Remote" to control iTunes® from afar, which in many ways is very similiar to the music module of Remote Buddy's AJAX Remote (which in its current form first came into existance around October 2007).

In case you're wondering, I don't feel bitter or angry nor do I feel any grief. Knowing about the popularity of Remote Buddy at Apple®, getting a hint or even an offer from Apple® would have been an appreciated move and - I'm sure - would have been to the benefit of everyone involved. But that's certainly not something Apple® can be asked or expected to do. That said, I'm fine with as it is now, too: an interesting new competitor has entered the market.

So what does this mean for the future of Remote Buddy's AJAX Remote?

I have been working on a native client for iPhone™ and iPod® Touch for several months now and I'll continue to work on it and release the client for free on the AppStore as soon as it's ready and Apple® approves it. That has always been the plan and I see no reason to not persue it further now:

• In terms of iTunes® remote control, even the current, private beta of the native Remote Buddy client already offers a lot of advantages and features over what "Remote" is offering.

• Just like Remote Buddy's AJAX Remote today, it'll be able to do a lot more than to "just" control iTunes®. Among many other things, it can also control mouse and keyboard of your Mac®, act as a remote for over 100 applications and "stream" your iSight®'s camera picture. The native client will build on this strong foundation, take it to the next level and also add a lot of fancy new stuff that I'm sure you'll love.

• Last but not least, the performance of the native client application is simply amazing and not at all comparable with the current AJAX Remote web application. The AJAX Remote web application will still be around in future versions, though: I know a lot of you are using it in desktop browsers or as widget on your Dashboard.

I stay fully committed to Remote Buddy and its future development. Stay tuned.

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.