I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing the new movie thumbnail view for all iPad models, including the original iPad 1, to work smoothly even with large libraries. The browser works in both portrait as well as landscape mode, just like the music and TV shows browsers. For large enough libraries a section index is included automatically for jumping quickly through different sections of your library. I’ve also updated the dedicated page here on my blog too with fresh screenshots. Enjoy!

By the way, movie support is going forward, my goal is to release it around the time that XBMC Eden is officially released as well.

Update: 1.4.3 which fixes this problem has been approved by Apple and is available as of March 2.

In the meantime I’m continuing my work on movie library browsing support.

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.

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.

Last, but certainly not least, I added preliminary support for XBMC’s nightly builds. I used the build from August 8 (a1c2947) to implement the changes for the upcoming Eden release. I’ll do my best to keep up with the nightly builds, but I will only be able to start guaranteeing Eden compatibility when the RC releases start. For now, any change developers might make to the JSON-RPC interface in XBMC might break compatibility.

For more information on XBMC Remote Control for iPad, you can also take a look at the (updated) dedicated page.

The artist, album and song information is cached locally on your iPad. The same for album thumbnails (which are downloaded and cached the first time you browse the album). This is mainly done for speed and UI responsiveness, but it enables browsing your music library without being connected to XBMC as well. Various artists are supported, as well as unknown albums (holding songs that are not associated with an album). You can play an album starting with a specific song, shuffle an album, and play or shuffle all albums by a single artist.

I will be updating the page on code-muse.com dedicated to XBMC Remote Control for iPad with new screenshots and description of the new features very soon.

As a corollary to Conway’s Law I would say: don’t hold on to existing organization structures, if they are in the way. In a software company, it’s the product that sells. So if you want to improve the product and go forward, you will need to be flexible and willing to change: the company and its product should evolve together.

I have been contemplating recently about this statement pushed towards the other far end: how would Conway’s law apply to (mostly large) corporations that shuffle around developers, ahem, “resources” from project to project? What software architecture would you get in that case? A Big Ball of Mud. Yep, that’s what I would say. Big Ball of Mud.

I originally built XBMC setup to replace my iPod that was struck by lightning, but besides music, I’m using XBMC very often too now to watch TV shows, movies, etc. To watch a TV show episode or movie you’re gonna have to have your TV turned on, so I mostly use XBMC’s on-screen menu to select the item to watch. That’s why I focused first on remote control in version 1.x. However, to turn on some music, it would be very nice if I wouldn’t have to turn on my TV to use my app for that purpose. So I’m now spending the time on my app working on support for browsing XBMC’s music library and being able to play artists, albums and individual songs from the music library. I’m planning that to be the next major update.