[dwagner]

SoulMote Free version 1.01 for Android is now available on Google Play

I plan to continue to improve the remote and as always feedback is always welcomed.



Version 1.01 comes packed with many features:
★ Fully supports XBMC Eden (v11) and also backwards compatible with version 10.1
★ Control multiple XBMC media centers with a touch of a button
★ Choose between bookshelf and list views
★ Supports landscape and portrait orientations.
★ Use your devices keyboard to type in text on XBMC
★ Adjust the XBMC volume with your devices volume buttons
★ Control your media center using gestures
★ Quickly access the remote from the options menu
★ Devices with a trackball can navigate the media center using the trackball while in the remote view.
★ Playlist view allows you to jump between items in your music or video playlists (re-ordering playlist supported when using xbmc with JSON API 3 support or above)
★ View your movies and TV shows by title, actors or genres
★ View your music by album title, artist or genres
★ View your cached media info even when you are not connected to XBMC
★ Supports cover art and thumbnails for all media including actors, music artists, movies, TV shows, episodes and more
★ Play ordered or shuffle play your music
★ Resume functionality for media that you have not finished watching
★ Easily find the media you are looking for by using the search functionality
★ Sort your media by name, rating, year released and recently added
★ Video media that you have watched are marked
★ Browse your directories through the sources view
★ Sources view shows you the date and time you last played the video media file
★ SoulMote smartly detects when media is already playing and will give you the option to play new files immediately or queue additional files
★ Remote view detects currently playing media and displays buttons specific to the playing media
★ Now Playing view allows you to easily jump to any point in the media by dragging a slider.

[Bram77]

I'd love to try it out, but I'm not sure what the advantages are compared to the official XBMC android remote. Why not offer a free version with adds so we can give it a go and see if we're willing to pay $2,99 for it?

Is file mode supported for videos and music?

[skabyss]

Not sure how much I dig the whole wood UI, but I FULLY support any android/xbmc projects. Good work!

[dwagner]

I'd love to try it out, but I'm not sure what the advantages are compared to the official XBMC android remote. Why not offer a free version with adds so we can give it a go and see if we're willing to pay $2,99 for it?

I am planning to do a limited feature ad supported version, but it will take some time as I owe a little attention to the iPhone version. I've developed the Android version in a way that once I have caught up all the features of the iPhone version, I will be able to update them almost at the same time. I would invite you to read the user reviews of the iPhone version, bad sadly if you don't have iTunes you can currently only see 2 on the iTunes site.

Is file mode supported for videos and music?

Are you referring to seeing your files as they would be in their directories? If so, then the answer is most definitely. Under sources you will get access to all your media files. Not only that, but with videos they will list with file date and last watched date, and even better SoulMote checks if you watched the file and marks it. For TV Shows it will even show you the wide cover art in place of the directory name. I've put a screenshot for you at the bottom. You may notice file names that are bigger then the devices portrait width, these are automatically scrolled in the app.

Not sure how much I dig the whole wood UI, but I FULLY support any android/xbmc projects. Good work!

Thanks. You will also be glad to know that I designed SoulMote Android in a way that will allow easy skinning. The plan is in future to expose this to end users, because without a doubt there are many talented users that can make awesome looking skins.

[dwagner]

I've updated the link of my first post to the new SoulMote Free Android App.
The free version comes packed with all the features of the full version. Some features are locked on launch and can be unlocked from the SoulTime section for free.

A few notes:
Users of the Cinema Experience plugin can launch a movie in the cinema experience by holding down the "play" button in SoulMote instead of just a tap.
If you have music playlists, these can be launched from the playlist section in the music view.
You can re-order the current playlist items by going to the remote > playlists section. Note that re-ordering is only supported when using JSON API 3 or above. In other words as long as you are using XBMC Eden (v11) or above and do not have override JSON selected in SoulMote.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

[Bram77]

I've tried the remote (free version) using the latest daily build of Xbmc and a Android 4.1.1 Cm10 based custom rom. None of the libraries or sources load and the app crashes very often. Xbmc does notify me about the remote app being connected and the basic remote functions do work.

Of course I do appreciate another remote and the fact that you've created a free version so quickly. Personally I'm not a fan of the theme, but I can imagine other people will like it.

In any case... Great that there's another fully featured remote app available. I'm sure the current issues will be ironed out. Once that's done I'l give it another go.

[dwagner]

I've tried the remote (free version) using the latest daily build of Xbmc and a Android 4.1.1 Cm10 based custom rom. None of the libraries or sources load and the app crashes very often. Xbmc does notify me about the remote app being connected and the basic remote functions do work.

I don't usually like to use nighty builds so far away from a stable release. My main reasoning is that as can be expected the XBMC team is constantly making changes. When I developed pre-eden the JSON API was in constant flux, so one day getting the media info would work and the next it would break because of a naming convention. If you are using the nightly I would recommend that you go to settings in SoulMote and enable override JSON API (be sure to also delete the cache). Even the official XBMC remote did all its queries using the deprecated HTTP API.

Having said that, out of interest I did download the latest version. I can already see that they have made a "major" change to the way images are reported with the JSON API (so thumbnails will not load when using JSON and the latest nightly).

I did however manage to list my media without issues (using both JSON and HTTP API). So if you do crash and it opts you to send a crash log, please do send them through. I will look through any reported crash logs to hunt down issues.

Of course I do appreciate another remote and the fact that you've created a free version so quickly. Personally I'm not a fan of the theme, but I can imagine other people will like it.

I appreciate your honest feedback. I took resources I had from one of SoulMote iPhone's skins. I would like to make a simple clean skin in the future. Right now my priority is features and stability. As mentioned in a previous post, my ultimate goal is to expose it so that any users who want to can make their own skin and share it with the community.

In any case... Great that there's another fully featured remote app available. I'm sure the current issues will be ironed out. Once that's done I'l give it another go.

Thanks for giving it a go. Please do try it out with JSON disabled. Also please make sure you have version 1.01 of SoulMote Free as there was a update not long after release.

I also invite any users who would like to beta test SoulMote during development to contact me. There are so many android devices out there, and unfortunately I only have very few to test with.

[DarkHelmet]

Thanks for making the app. Some things I noticed:

The remote constantly crashes in the music section in artist view
Posters for movie sets are not displayed.

Unfortunately since I use xbmc mostly for music, I can't use it right now due to constant crashing, but please keep up the good work.

I'm using xbmc 11.0 on an appletv 2 and android 2.3.5

[Porogna]

Thanks for porting this app to Android!

Am having a few issues though:

- Banners won't display in the TV Shows section (these are named banner.jpg in my tv show folders)
- Nothing is displayed in the Music section
- Crashes every time I try to access, Music Sources, in the Sources section
- Crashes every time I try to load up the, Movies section

I am using the paid version off the Play store. It happens on both my HTC Velocity 4G and ASUS Transformer Prime TF201 (both are running Android 4.0.3)

[dwagner]

SoulMote version 1.10 was uploaded today. It may take a bit of time before it appears on google play store.

The remote constantly crashes in the music section in artist view

I did find a bug in the artist section which I fixed. It was caused when artists had inverted commas in their names.
If you have further issues, it would make it easy if you gave me you xbmc music db file. That way I can emulate the issue you are having.

Posters for movie sets are not displayed.

This should work with Version 1.10, as I've added new code to download the movie set thumbnails (as long as you use the JSON API).

- Banners won't display in the TV Shows section (these are named banner.jpg in my tv show folders)
- Nothing is displayed in the Music section
- Crashes every time I try to access, Music Sources, in the Sources section
- Crashes every time I try to load up the, Movies section

Hi Porogna,
Please can you confirm the XBMC version you are using and also the operating system it is running on.
Music Sources incorrectly showed Picture Sources. This is fixed in version 1.10. I think I may have also found the cause of the crash you got on picture sources (though it didn't make it into version 1.10)
As for the movie crash, I wonder if this is caused by out of heap memory error when trying to load thumbnails. Try version 1.10 as it checks your free heap memory on startup and scales down images if it sees that you have less then 8Mb free. You can also go to the support section, and click email support, this will bring up an email that will contain information about your heap size.
In regards to the banners, if you are using JSON the images are specified to me by the results from the JSON Query. So maybe there is a bug with XBMC. If you have time you can either PM me, or send me a support email through SoulMote Support section, and I'll tell you how to test output the data so we can see if your banner images are correctly shown in JSON.
In regards to the music section, forgive me if this is a silly question but did you tag and scan in all your music on XBMC?

If the app asks you to submit a crash report please do so, and put your XBMC forum username in the comment, along of what you did when the crash happened.

Other changes in Version 1.10
I have fixed a crash when using "Discover Hosts" on some Android devices.
I have redone the image cache system to support the new pre-frodo image system which is currently running on the nightly builds.
I strongly discourage using the nightly builds at this time with SoulMote for a few reasons:
1. Although the new image system is working, the XBMC team are still developing it. Currently its super slow compared to using XBMC Eden.
2. Some things are broken. For example music albums in json no longer give me the music artist id, so that means you'll see music artists but when you click an artist, no music albums will show up.

In regards to my previous post regarding using HTTP API with a nightly build. Please note that this was incorrect. The only reason the images were displayed correctly for me with the HTTP API was because XBMC left all my old thumbnails intact. When I did a fresh install I noted that in the nightly builds the image thumbnail storage is completely different then in XBMC Eden and versions before.

[dwagner]

I've uploaded a new version today which fixes a crash bug that some users may experience trying to list movies.
In addition I've added a safety check which should fix the crash bug that was caused on empty sources.

[e2zippo]

Looks great, is is tablet optimized?

Cheers!

[dwagner]

Looks great, is is tablet optimized?

I use the Samsung GT-P1000 tablet for development. It looks great on the tablet.

I've coded the main menu, remote and bookshelf views to auto scale themselves to fit any screen size (the resources were taken from the iPad version so they should look good on android tablets as well). The only side effect I've noticed is sometimes the directional buttons are 1 pixel off from the scaling breaking the perfect circle (but its a minor issue).

Try it out and see how it looks on your tablet. If you feel something is off do let me know. SoulMote will keep improving all the time and feedback is welcome.

[aptalca]

Looks pretty cool, good job.

But out of curiosity, how come you decided to release your own android remote rather than contributing to the official android remote? The official remote is open source, but unfortunately no commits have been made in over 4 months. It is already pretty stable and full of features (Thousands of people are already using it). It just needs talented developers like you to add some more functionality from time to time to keep it up-to-date.

Source is hosted on github: https://github.com/freezy/android-xbmcremote

Thanks

PS. Like I said, I am just curious to find out :-)

EDIT: I also posted a similar question on YATSE's android widget/remote thread right here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1154822

[dwagner]

But out of curiosity, how come you decided to release your own android remote rather than contributing to the official android remote? The official remote is open source, but unfortunately no commits have been made in over 4 months. It is already pretty stable and full of features (Thousands of people are already using it). It just needs talented developers like you to add some more functionality from time to time to keep it up-to-date.

Late in 2010 I purchased an XBMC remote for my iPhone (called XBMC Remote). Sadly not long after I purchased it, the developer stopped updating it, and I started having problems using it with XBMC 10. So I decided to make my own remote. That's how SoulMote was born. Fast forward 35000 users and I started getting requests to bring SoulMote to Android. I began porting SoulMote as part of a learning experience, as I had never written a native Android app before. I kept the code as close to the iPhone/iPad version as possible. This allows me to make improvements to both versions quite quickly, and it sometimes also helps in squashing bugs on both os's.

I use any money I make from the remote to continue to improve it. My greatest pleasure has been the positive feedback I have received on the iPhone/iPad version. I hope in time that the Android version will give users the same positive experience.