Remedie

More like a desktop app: Drag & Drop sorting and incremental filter

Remedie runs as a web server but its philosopy is to build a desktop-app-like experience using web browser's functionalities with jQuery extensions. This weekend I was working on some small but important UI enhancements to get close to the goal.

The first is that you can now drag and drop channels in the channel list view to change the order of channel list. The way it works is so straightforward, but take a look:

This is implemented using the new jQuery UI 1.7 and when you change the order the app will sync the order back to the server asynchronously so the next time when you load Remedie app the order will still be preserved. Yeah, the next thing I'd like to do is a folder support and drop channels to the folder :)

Another enhancement is to filter channel and items in the list view. The filter works as an incremental search, so it filters out the items as you type. This would be handy if you add the local folder as a channel and list items only matching with specific title.

In the channel list view, the filter matches with channel titles, and in the channel details view, it matches with item title and desription (if any).

These new UI features are added and released in 0.4.1. Try it out with github master.

0.4.0 released with Fluid and iPhone UI integrated

Fluid is a WebKit based Site Specific Browser (SSB) with lots of goodies, like Full-screen support, UserScripts support and JavaScript API to access Mac OS X specific features like Growl notification.

Friday night I hacked a little on Remedie JavaScript to add some neat features like that, notably to enable native Growl notification instead of jGrowl, and display unwatched item counts in the dock badge. I could think of more integrations using UserScripts like activating the window from Growl, or writing Fluid plugin to listen to Apple Remote key input etc. But I think it's a good start.

And oh yeah, we need a graphics designer to design the application logo and some icons :)

These recent Fluid and iPhone hacks are relatively small JavaScript code updates, but it's a good enough eye-candy to bump up the minor version from 0.3.x to 0.4.0!

iPhone UI is merged

Thanks to my co-worker Sekimura I was able to test the iPhone UI for Remedie with his iPhone. And it worked great. Most H.264 videos are playable inline with QuickTime, while other embed videos open with Safari browser (though most flash videos won't play there), but most importantly, YouTube videos are played automatically on iPhone YouTube app.

The code is now merged to master of Github repository. We still plan to add the functionality to play video files on the host machine running Remedie so we can use the iPhone/iPod touch as a software remote.

iPhone UI for Remedie with iUI

Pictures worth thousands words.

I don't actually own my iPhone or iPod touch, but currently the item page opens the media if the item has a link to actual media file, and opens the web page with Mobile Safari if not (i.e. embed items from YouTube or Nico Nico Douga). I'm thinking of adding support of "iPhone as a remote" mode, so that clicking "Play" will open the link or media file in the remote box running Remedie.

This iPhone UI is done using HTML and JavaScript framework iUI with just 100+ lines of code. Take a look at the code and try it out with github master.

TheWB.com plugin

Site plugin for TheWB.com is now available in github master. You can subscribe to the full length episodes from the show page like Veronica Mars