A minor update of XBMC Remote Control for iPad is now available on the App Store, which adds support for the upcoming XBMC 11.0 (Eden). If you are still using nightly builds, please make sure it is from October 19 or later. Upcoming Eden beta’s and RC builds should be fully supported, because the XBMC development team has frozen the JSON-RPC interface, that XBMC Remote Control for iPad uses to communicate with XBMC.
In the meantime I’m continuing my work on movie library browsing support.
The past two months I have gone back to being a student again. Well, at least in the evening hours. Following ai-class.com took a significant part of the time I would have otherwise spent on other personal endeavors such as reading, blogging or writing XBMC remotes, but it was worth every minute. Although the future might prove me wrong, I have the feeling that the internet — after affecting or re-inventing many other fields — is now starting to redefine education as well. Not that the internet itself reinvents something; its of course humans themselves that redefine things using the internet as a new medium. That’s what Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun did with their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” class.
Salman Kahn’s Kahn Academy was the first pioneer that I heard of that was trying to combine education and the internet in a very useful way, and he’s ever-expanding the number of online lessons you can watch. With 2,700 videos you can learn something new everyday for the next 7 years. Amazing.
Back in August I read on Hacker News the announcement that Stanford is opening up an AI class via the web. For free. I was really excited about this idea and I enrolled that same day. During my CS program at the Eindhoven University of Technology I didn’t really took any of the AI or machine learning tracks, so it would also be a very interesting topic for me to learn more about. How would that be, to enroll and follow a full class through the internet? Would I be able to do a Stanford-level class in my spare time, next to my day-time job? Is this the future of education?
After going through the full class I can only say I liked it very much. The material was interesting, the format was very well thought out, and both professor Norvig and professor Thrun are apt and enthusiastic teachers. To get a feeling of the format, just follow one or two units, do some quizzes or take a look at the homework or exam questions. There were teething problems of course, and obviously an actual live lecture with a teacher and peers is in many ways incomparable to following an online class by yourself. However I believe this is a really good start and gets very close; after finishing the final exam and receiving my final rating, the accomplishment feels the same as it felt when I was attending university.
Summarized, I’ve learned a lot about a field that I had left unexplored up to now, and while doing that I might have also seen a glimpse of the future.
The latest update of XBMC Remote Control for iPad adds long-awaited support for browsing your TV shows library and directly starting an episode from inside the browser; you can get the latest version from the App Store. I’ve re-used the concept for browsing an artist’s albums for browsing a TV show’s seasons and episodes and I think the result works very well. For screenshots check out XBMC Remote Control for iPad’s dedicated page.
Besides some minor improvements and bug fixes I also implemented the support for the changes in the nightly builds made on September 5. I tested with the build from September 10 (caab280), which worked for me. Builds from before September 6 are *not* supported anymore, so please make sure to update XBMC if you encounter problems with nightly builds. Again, I’ll do my best to keep up with the JSON-RPC developments, but I cannot guarantee anything until RC cycles start.
I know this is only half of full video library support, but I’m working hard on movie support though. So more features to come soon.