Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

Plex/Seven: Integrated Sparkle and Battery Monitoring

November 10th, 2008 | Category: Status | Author: elan

First of all, thanks to everyone yesterday who took the time to comment on our first feature exposé for Plex/Seven! We really appreciate the feedback and kind words.

Since the very first time I used XBMC on my old XBox, I longed for the ability for it to auto-update itself. Now Plex has had Sparkle update capabilities for a while, but let’s face it, it wasn’t perfect. It would pop up a Cocoa window, and you’d have to change to windowed mode in order to finish the update. Your friends would mock you and your wife would eventually start seeing the FedEx delivery man. This left you feeling empty and yearning for a truly integrated update that you could complete while eating pizza and spilling beer on yourself, greasy Apple Remote in hand.

That day is here!

James has worked some major Cocoa magic in order to seamlessly integrate Sparkle into Plex. Every part of the update is now done inside Plex. Rest easy, though, because it will never interrupt while you’re watching a video to harass you about a new version. That would be rude.

While he was at it, James also added support for low battery warnings on laptops. What a major buzz-kill it would be if you were just getting to the, let’s say, “climax” of the movie you were watching only to have your laptop go black with a dead battery. Bummer, right? Well, here’s what you’ll see instead:

When you see this warning, walk, don’t run, to the nearest power outlet and plug your poor starving laptop in.

This should give you an idea of how seriously we’re taking OS X integration in this next, post-stabilization phase of Plex development. Four more of the new features deal with OS X integration in some way, and we hope you enjoy reading about them!

17 Comments so far

graeme November 10th, 2008 10:49 pm

So good to see a developer actually listening to feedback and giving users what they want. Thanks guys, you have made my day with this one.
FLX November 10th, 2008 11:36 pm

Good job! Awesome!
Jason.Western.Australia November 11th, 2008 12:12 am

You guys seriously rock.

I don’t have a Mac to run this on yet, but I continue looking at the progress and updates you guys are coming out with and am drooling with anticipation for my Mac to use Plex on.

Cheers,

Jason.
plexfan November 11th, 2008 3:35 am

you guys are awesome. really appreciate your philosophy, and am very excited to see this approach being taken with a platform with such potential. I’ve already shelved my xbox, because plex blows the original xbmc away. keep up the great work. How do you guys get paid or plan to get paid for this stuff?
Keane16 November 11th, 2008 3:51 am

Nice, very handy.

The XBMC Plex features divide is opening. And I like it!!

The update side of things will be very handy for Mac Mini/HTPC users who only have a remote and no Keyboard/Mouse lying around.

Looking forward to the BIG (in my eyes) integration features in the next few days.
deanm3 November 11th, 2008 3:58 am

Plex/Seven : Native 24p support. ( Although through my research I’m not quite sure that the GMA950 chip can do this !? )
Skywalker November 11th, 2008 4:55 am

This software really amazes me at every release.
william gates November 11th, 2008 5:01 am

Wonderful!! I hated the update window
Nigel November 11th, 2008 5:04 am

This all looks very, very cool. Nice work. These types of details will make this an outstanding app.
Danny November 11th, 2008 8:43 am

Very cool. I had the update window pop up in the middle of Iron Man the other day with all my family over. They were so impressed until that and I had to run up and pause, switch to windowed mode, find my mouse curser, kill the update window, switch back to full screen, apologize profusely and resume.
opet November 11th, 2008 10:27 am

Brilliant! Loving the new updater. I would’ve loved the low battery warning as well if my battery lasted more than 15 minutes…

Keep up the good work!
BrandonG777 November 11th, 2008 10:47 am

This is awesome for my Mac Mini hooked up in the bedroom to our flatscreen that has no keyboard or mouse. No longer have to VNC in with my MacBook or iPhone Except when Plex crashes which IS rare these days
grey November 11th, 2008 3:39 pm

Sweet! Say, in the future adding a feature to remap apple remote functions would be sweet too; I’d kind of like to have volume control a little more apple-remote friendly a-la frontrow, and as much as ffwd/chapter skip is handy at times, I think I could get by with just the ffwd/longffwdspeedup/down instead of chapter skip. Albeit, I’m sure others like it as is, but configurability would be swell.

really looking forward to .7!
iBenoit November 11th, 2008 4:51 pm

I take it that the bat notice will occur in a corner of a playing video and not only when I am going through Plex videos…

Wouldn’t it be cool if Plex reacted in a similar fashion if we got email in our mail client or if a twitter msg came up…

Great work guys. Plex is truely one of my fav aps on my mini.

iBenoit
Ranglin November 12th, 2008 12:11 am

Wouldn’t it be cool if Plex reacted in a similar fashion if we got email in our mail client or if a twitter msg came up…

This would be SO cool, but I can imagine a little tricky to code… Would be nice tho, since you could then twitter your Plex box…
rickler November 12th, 2008 5:28 am

@Ranglin

There is an python script called XBMCMail V0.31 originally written for XBMC that checks pop3 accounts. This should work with Plex.

For a python coder interested, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem to build a plugin using the Twitter API.
ppson November 12th, 2008 7:45 am

Very nice!

(to Ranglin: I don’t know if it works cause I haven’t tried it, but maybe you would be able to get this using Growl, assuming the notifications show on top of Plex)