Snow Leopard thaws to the Apple Remote, thanks to Remote Buddy Author
One of our biggest disappointments with Snow Leopard was the fact that third party support for the Apple Remote was changed (or broken), and applications like Plex, EyeTV and VLC were on the receiving end. Apart from one person who posted “Plex works perfectly on Snow Leopard for me!” (who either used the keyboard exclusively, or suffered from extreme overoptimism) our forums and twittersphere filled with complaints about the new behavior, which rendered the Apple Remote practically unusable for Plex.
Our friend Evan Schoenberg looked into the issue, and ended up filing a bug with Apple, who replied “this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering“. We had high hopes for 10.6.1, but unfortunately it didn’t help. There are rumors that 10.6.2 may contain a fix, but also rumors that the change in behavior was intentional.
Over the months, we’ve also gotten to know Felix Schwarz, the author of Remote Buddy, the popular and powerful remote control solution for the Mac. He has been extremely helpful to us, reviewing our remote code, suggesting improvements, and sending us sample code. He is, without a doubt, the foremost expert on the Apple Remote outside of Apple.
After investigating the problem, he decided a few weeks ago to provide a solution himself, in the form of a free alternative driver for the IR receiver which would provide reliable exclusive access to the Apple Remote across Leopard and Snow Leopard. In addition, he’s made available an Objective-C class which makes adding Apple Remote support to an application trivially simple.
The driver itself comes in the form of a preference pane, easy to install from the web site. Once installed, you’ll be able to use Plex perfectly in Snow Leopard with the Apple Remote, with no annoying loss of exclusive access that you may have observed under Leopard.
I can’t emphasis how great this development is, and how grateful we should all be to Felix. Please consider purchasing Remote Buddy, at around $30 it’s a great deal and an extremely powerful solution for those who like to customize the way the Apple Remote works with their Mac.
We are currently testing the integration of Felix’s code into Plex (many thanks to Evan for working on this!), and this is one of the reasons why 0.8.3 is taking a bit longer than expected.
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Well done Felix & the Plex developers for befriending a genius!! Will be upgrading now and buying Remote Buddy
Awesome! Makes me happy that I bought the beta of Remote Buddy years ago.
great news!!! woohoo!!! once 8.3 is certified for SL, i’ll upgrade
Thats great news! Big thanks to Felix!
Awesome news and waiting 0.8.3, thanks!
I have Remote Buddy and is a great software. I’m very happy with him. It is easy to use when you understand his interface. In fact, I’m using it every day for every application.
(Sorry for my mistakes… i’m learning English
Thank a lot Felix and the Plex crew!
I own Remote Buddy and it’s great – I use it from my remote and my iPhone and it’s worked very well! I recommend it if you want to be able to control any app with your remote.
This is amazing, working perfect! You guys rock.
Respect!
Didn’t update my MacMini yet to SL because of the remote problem. So many thanks to all people working on this!
Excellent news. I’ve got a Plexless iMac at the moment. As soon as 0.8.3 drops I’m there!
Great news!
Thank you Felix! A minor issue though, F8 (play/pause) still launches iTunes in 10.6.1 even if another application (for example Spotify) is open.
It would be perfect if, in a future update, Candelair could also fix that bug in Apples implementation. (Not sure it is within the scope of the Candelair though.)
Thank you Felix! We all really appriciate your work and your will to help open source Project even though you could have implemented this just for your commercial appilcation. I will look into remote buddy and consider buying it. Thanks!
Does Plex work with the Harmony remote under Snow Leopard? Maybe I do not need to wait to upgrade…
I’m a huge fan of Remote Buddy and its extreme extensibility. Thanks for the support, Felix!
Great news, Remote Buddy is a great little app I purchased it a while back. Great to see a solution. Looking forward to Plex 0.8.3
I just got my new Mac mini yesterday, and learnt the remote issues by launching iTunes each time I navigated.
So thank you Felix for this!
I received my new Mac mini yesterday, and got 2 issues with Plex: the sound dropping, and the remote.
Now with this program, a reboot, and a work-around for the sound, everything works perfectly: no more Front Row/iTunes popping up.
Thank you Felix for this program.
one less reason for me not to buy one of the new SL mini’s as an upgrade to my 1.83ghz leopard one.
what is the status with the new metal apple remote with the two extra buttons – will that “just work” or will it need to be fixed, or will something need to be programmed to support the extra buttons or what?
Oh how I love remote buddy. One of the best pieces of software I have ever purchased
Oh man, thank you so much for this. It has definitely been the biggest problem to come up in snow leopard for me so far
“what is the status with the new metal apple remote with the two extra buttons ”
Which two extra buttons are those, “name required”? All I can see on the new remote are the buttons the old one always had but located in slightly different locations.
Either way, old or new remote I’m delighted to see another fix for SL & Plex appear!
Sofa Control + SL works fine too. Remote buddy seems alot cooler though.
With this, I installed Snow Leopard on my Mac Minis. Works as advertised.
Apple Remote… Stupid IR. Why can’t they make it Bluetooth, for Christ’s sake? My $3500 Mac Pro doesn’t have IR, only Bluetooth.
Finally i have a working media center again!!!
Thanks guys for this great work!!!
Sofa Control + 10.5 + candelair gives me kernel panic at boot !!!
@ Navid:
There was a rare, Leopard-only issue (with about 0.07% of users affected) in v1.0 of Candelair. This issue has now been identified, addressed and fixed.
I have posted a more lengthy analysis and explanation of what caused the issue over in the Plex 0.8.3 thread comments (at the time of writing, it still seems to be in the approval queue).
To remove the old version from your system:
1) Boot into single user mode by following the instructions at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1492
2) when you arrive at the “:/ root#” prompt, type in
rm -Ri /System/Library/Extensions/RBIOKitHelper.kext
and confirm the deletion of the files located at and within /System/Library/Extensions/RBIOKitHelper.kext.
3) when done, type in
reboot
4) Your Mac will now reboot. Let is start up normally without pressing any keys during startup.
5) When reinstalling the Candelair driver, please be sure you’re at 1.0.2 (driver version 1.7.2) or later. You can find both version numbers by pressing on the “About” button in the Candelair preference pane.
Best regards,
Felix Schwarz
You brought me back to life.
Ton of tanks, my friends.
I’ve heard there are some wildlife groups trying to get Apple to do more stuff with the actual S.L.’s lol. I don’t know- people are saying it’s good PR for Apple- they should jump on that.