The Make-a-Jumi-Remote-in-an-afternoon Challenge

I’m going to turn this lazy Saturday into a really productive one. I’m wearing the “Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?” t-shirt, I am unshaven and by this evening I will have (hopefully) made something awesome.

I successfully installed Windows 8 a couple of days ago, and this morning I had an idea to make a Jumi Remote that works with the new start screen. Hopefully it will be easier to get to all the new features. Or it might be a complete failure.

(JumiRemotes is an app for iOS and Android. JumiController for Windows needs to be running on your PC in order to connect)

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Here it is, the long awaited remote for Photo Gallery! It does many things that I am happy about, and other things I am less happy about.

Good things:

• Navigate within a folder of photos
• View large photos
• Rotate photos
• Add ratings
• Flag images
• Delete photos

Not bad, but not good either things:

• Slideshow. Although it does load its own page to navigate slideshows more efficiently, I’m personally not happy that it will only show the Pan and Zoom show, but maybe I’m being picky.
• It doesn’t start Photo Gallery when the remote is loaded.

When you’re normally using the remote, it looks like this

Then when you view a slideshow, it changes to this

When you want to rate a photo, a selection screen pops up like this

I was also going to have separate screens for selecting the type of slideshow and a delete query, but I thought they were unnecessary.

As always, feedback goes to the comments below – I’ll usually read them and get back to you within minutes if I have nothing better to do (which, let’s face it, is most of the time).

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Windows Media Center (v4)

Today was a very lazy Sunday. In order to prevent the boredom from kicking in, I decided to pick up on from when I stopped developing version 4 of my remote for Windows Media Center. That’s when I realised it was exactly a year since I published version 3!

I didn’t like many things with my current version. Firstly, I didn’t like the shape or style of the buttons. Also I was all too aware that my ‘ergonomic’ controls didn’t favour the left-handed population, and I didn’t like it either.

So I’ve gone back a step. The layout of the buttons is similar to that in version 2, but they’re now spread out over two pages. You’ll also notice that my design is very ‘Metro’, similar to the Windows Phone interface. Personally I like it – there aren’t any sharp edges and it’s much cleaner.

       

Cool feature – in the Navigation screen, you’ll notice the back arrow in the top left corner. Now that’s a little hard to reach if you’re using your right thumb. Never fear though, you can still hit that button in that apparently blank area underneath the back button. Also, when you press the back button in the Playback screen, you’ll automatically be taken to the Navigation screen.

You’ll notice I’ve got a TV tab at the bottom. There’s nothing there at the moment, but I want to get a version out before adding the TV functionality. So version 4.0 will have a TV button but it won’t do anything. That’ll be fixed for 4.1. You should, however, be able to do a fair amount of TV tasks without the extra TV buttons.

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Microsoft PowerPoint (v2)

I have updated my PowerPoint remote to include portrait and landscape capability. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the iPhone accelerometer, so you’ve got to change it manually by pressing the conveniently placed button on the remote. I don’t think it’s too much of a hassle anyway :P


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Spotify (v1)

Well, I’ve fixed the skip bug, and I can’t find a keyboard shortcut to mute it, so you’ll have to make do by holding the volume down button.

Another problem which I can’t fix is that you can’t get the remote to lock on to the Spotify window, so you can’t control the window if it’s off focus. This is because the window’s title changes depending on what song’s playing. Perhaps a future JumiController update might be able to resolve this, but for now, this is the best I can do.

In summary, this remote controls the Spotify application’s playback (not navigation). The picture pretty much sums it up.

For those unaware, Spotify is a music streaming service for the UK, Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden. I think they’re going stateside soon, but they’re not quite there yet.


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VisualBoyAdvance

Since finishing my exams (yay!) I downloaded a gameboy emulator, then made a remote for it because I wanted to, and it's awesome.

The remote looks like this,

And can be played like this.

One bug I've noticed with this is that sometimes you can press a button and it won't release. For example, when you have your thumb on the d-pad and you're walking about in Pokémon, you might find that the character keeps walking in one direction even when you lift your thumb off the screen completely. Just by tapping that button again stops the extended keypress, but I think this might be a problem with JumiController rather than my remote. Yes, it is much easier to blame others.

In the possibly likely case you found this page by Googling "Visual Boy Advance controller for iPod / iPhone", I’d recommend you click onto my 'Welcome' page, which tells you how to install everything you need.

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