Hi folks, Just a brief note to report on some modest progress towards having an environment for developing 'remote controls' with XMPP, which vapourware I'm calling 'Buttons' for now. Rather than jumping straight into protocol design I have been poking around with media centres (the xbmc, boxee, plex family; itunes) and with remote controls - in particular this week, the little white apple remotes that come with most recent Apple hardware.
Working backwards, a few blog posts with notes: http://danbri.org/words/2009/10/23/492 Remote Remotes http://danbri.org/words/2009/10/19/483 Streaming Apple Events over XMPP http://danbri.org/words/2009/10/18/478 Apple Remote events – a quick howto http://danbri.org/words/2009/10/09/452 Linked TV (part 1): Why APIs and identifiers matter ...all XMPP mockups I've done so far have just used textual messages via chat events rather than structured IQ stanzas, but it's been nice to show that I can pause a running Boxee (and lookup metadata) on the Apple TV via sending a line from an XMPP client on my iPhone; or that I can simultaneously send handheld remote control clicks to running HTML webapps (different laptops, browsers at same time even). At some point it'll be time for serious protocol work, but for now I think fact finding and collecting hackable demo-friendly tools is more important. Right now I'm just reading up on the possibilities for using BOSH where the HTML is served from a different host to that running the BOSH adaptor. This would be very useful for embedding remote-linked webapps in social network sites (OpenSocial eg. MySpace, Orkut, Hyves; or Facebook). If anyone here has experience with that, please let me know! So for now I want to make a few demos: one broadcasting naive ui events (clicks) up to a web page with an embedded video player; another where the buttons are sending some more meaningful events, ie. commands rather than clicks. Perhaps with the buttons in a web page and the media player being Boxee. I'm also trying to figure out whether http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria.php could be useful for attaching remote UI to existing HTML/js/css/ajax interfaces, or for providing an xmpp/buttons-friendly abstraction over such UI. cheers, Dan ps. Thanks for all the feedback in previous messages; sorry if I didn't reply individually yet... pps. ongoing bookmarks c/o http://delicious.com/danbri/buttons ppps. motivating scenario: pause your TV (perhaps tivo/freevo/mythv/get_iplayer) via a remote running on your mobile phone; tag it with on-screen ui and record audio annotations into the phone microphone...
