HippoRemote Blog

HippoRemote Pro 2.3 has been approved by Apple and should be available on the App Store shortly (if it’s not already there)! There are a ton of significant changes, particularly under-the-hood speed and performance improvements. But there are a number of noteworthy new features as well. Let’s go over them!

FAST APP SWITCHING & FAST RECONNECT:

The biggest new feature is support for iOS 4 multitasking. How multitasking works on the iPhone has been covered extensively by other sites, but the key point is that it’s a bit different than what you and I are used to on Macs and PCs.

You still can’t quite run multiple apps simultaneously on an iPhone. But with a feature called Fast App Switching, Apple has provided a means to greatly reduce the delay when switching between apps. Prior to iOS 4, switching apps meant quitting the current app, launching a new app, and waiting for it to load. Switching frequently meant you spent an inordinate amount of time waiting for apps to finish launching. In iOS 4, Apple has eliminated the wait. Instead of quitting and relaunching, apps are frozen when you leave them and “reheated” when you return. Since you don’t have to relaunch the app, you can pick up exactly where you left off with minimal delay.

Fast App Switching is relatively straightforward to implement for basic apps, but it’s a bit trickier for HippoRemote since it has to maintain a connection to your computer. Keeping the connection open while frozen is disallowed by Apple and unnecessarily drains your battery. But having to choose a connection every time you return to HippoRemote is annoying. To solve this, we created a feature called Fast Reconnect. HippoRemote detects that you’re switching back and forth between apps and saves off connection information so that it can automatically reconnect you super quickly.

Fast Reconnect is extremely fast and extremely convenient. So convenient, in fact, that we brought it to non-iOS 4 devices. Even if you’re using an older iPhone or iPod touch that doesn’t have multitasking, you’ll still be able to switch in & out of HippoRemote quickly.

DISCONNECT BUTTON:

Fast App Switching and Fast Reconnect is great, but they do introduce one piece of complexity for people who control multiple computers. Previously, to connect to a different computer, you simply restarted HippoRemote and picked another connection. But with Fast Reconnect, you won’t always get that option. So we’ve added a disconnect button. Two, in fact. One in the settings screen, and one on the Shake Menu.

REVAMPED KEYBOARD:

The HippoRemote keyboard has been overhauled under-the-hood. We’ve both simplified and improved the keyboard. Previously, there were two modes – live and buffered – and auto-correction and certain international keyboards would only work in one mode and not the other.

Now, we’ve eliminated modes. You just type. If you turn on auto-correction and international keyboard support, they just work. You can cut & paste. You can edit the beginning, middle or end of the text and HippoRemote automatically mirrors the changes to your computer.

TEXTEXPANDER SUPPORT:

An additional bonus of our improved keyboard is TextExpander support. If you haven’t heard of TextExpander, it’s a wonderful utility that lets you save and quickly retype snippets of text. It’s a must have for heavy typists on the Mac. TextExpander touch for iPhone brings your snippets to the phone, letting you quickly enter your text in a variety of apps. And now with TextExpander support built into HippoRemote, you can take your snippets with you to ANY computer. Including Windows and Linux PCs.

The promise of software keyboards is to be smarter and more efficient than their physical counterparts. With built-in keyboard history and now TextExpander support, the HippoRemote keyboard is the most productive and efficient keyboard available.

WRAPUP:

Thanks for making it all the way to the end! It’s a long post for a 0.1 update, but we packed a bunch of stuff into it. We hope you find them useful! And as always, we’d love to hear your feedback, so email us at hipporemote@robohippo.com with your comments, suggestions, and ideas!

In case you missed it, Clicker announced a TV-optimized version of their web site — Clicker.tv — at last week’s Google I/O conference.

With interface and keyboard controls implemented using HTML5, I can browse Clicker’s database of online videos Flash-free. No incessant CPU and GPU fan noise. Actually watching videos, however, inevitably kicks the fans into high gear.

Grab the profile here.

Thanks go to Krunoslav Labazan for creating a profile for GOM Player.

Grab it from our profile repository.

HippoRemote Pro 2.2 has been approved by Apple! This means that all the Game Controller goodness we talked about in our previous post is ready to go!

We’ve got four game profiles available, and a few more still in the works. The current profiles are Braid, Trine, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and Portal. Three outstanding (and inexpensive) indie games, and one of the greatest games of all time.

Get Portal For Free!

With the release of Steam for Mac last week, Portal is FREE until May 24th! So click on the link below and grab it now!

http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/

Then grab our Portal profile and start unlocking those achievements! And keep in touch by adding HippoRemote to your Steam friends. =)

Mac HippoVNC Update

On the topic of Mac gaming, our testing with Steam uncovered some mouse control issues. We’ve fixed them, but Mac users will need to update HippoVNC. If you’re not using HippoVNC, then games like Portal will not be playable. Screen Sharing simply doesn’t support the necessary functionality.

Creating Game Profiles

Of the four available profiles, two are keyboard only games and the other two require simultaneous keyboard and mouse control. Hopefully they will serve as good starting points for your own game profiles. We’ll also be adding more instructions and documentation but we’re currently away on a semi-vacation. We’ll get right on it when we’re back in town, but until then, please be patient. Thanks!

We are answering emails, though with a little bit of a delay. So if you need help getting your game profile up and running, drop us a line.

Limitations

There are some limitations to the game controller. First, it’s not compatible with every game. In particular, really old games and emulators are not supported.

Second, as mentioned above, HippoVNC is required. Standard VNC servers don’t support the necessary control methods to make gaming possible.

Third, on the Mac, certain games that change the screen resolution when going into full screen mode may not work correctly. It’s something we’re looking into.

So let me get right to it: We’re adding a game controller in our next HippoRemote Pro update! Soon, you’ll be able to play your favorite PC games from the comfort of your couch. No more keyboard and mouse to tether you to your desk.

There are a number of gamepad apps available in the App Store. Virtually all of them have a directional pad on the left, a button pad on the right, and some miscellaneous buttons in between. And our controller has them as well.

HOWEVER, our gamepad has an additional mode that combines a d-pad with a multi-touch trackpad. So you’ll be able to play all those games that rely on simultaneous keyboard and mouse access, including first person shooters like Portal and Team Fortress 2.

And because our gamepad leverages App Profiles, it’s customized for each game, giving you the exact controls you need.

Now, we’re just a small indie developer and we simply don’t have the resources to make profiles for all the PC games out there today, so we’re asking for your help. We’ll be posting instructions on how to create gamepad-enabled profiles on our website and answering any questions via email.

One final thing…

You may have noticed that we mentioned Portal and Team Fortress 2 earlier — games that are available as part of Steam for Mac. Steam for Mac is a big moment for Mac gaming and we desperately want to support it. In fact, our gamepad update was already under review with Apple. But with Steam for Mac releasing today, we’ve pulled our update to do additional Mac testing with the initial set of games. With any luck, the process will be smooth and painless and we’ll ready to resubmit shortly. Regardless, know that we’re working hard so that Mac and PC gamers can play!

I generally don’t like talking about things before they are done, since as a small company our plans and priorities can change rather suddenly. Plus, our development style is pretty experimental. We try a lot of things and end up throwing away most of them because they don’t end up working as well as we initially imagined.

That said, a lot of folks have been asking about our iPad plans and rather than continually responding with no comment, I figure I would just lay bare what we know right now (which isn’t a whole lot).

Are we working on an iPad version of HippoRemote?
Yes.

When will it be ready?
When we’re happy with it.

Will it be a universal app?
We haven’t decided. We’re not thinking about anything other than making an app we love using every day.

So there it is — our iPad Plan. It’s not much, but it’s all we have right now.

HippoRemote Pro 2.1 is now available in the App Store! We’ve fixed some bugs and made some performance improvements, but the big new feature in this release is the GesturePad Plugin!

The GesturePad Plugin offers the same flicking & swiping control as the Boxee Plugin except that it can be configured to work with apps other than Boxee! The first GesturePad-enabled profile we are releasing is for Hulu Desktop. You can download it directly to Hippo Pro by tapping on the “+” button in the profiles screen. We’ll be releasing more over time as it takes quite a bit of tweaking to get these gesture-enabled profiles just right. Also, not every app is suited to gesture-based control. Some programs just work better with buttons.

In the meantime, let us know what you think! We’d love to have some feedback.

The story behind LITE

Last week, we released HippoRemote LITE, a free (ad-supported) version of HippoRemote. The story behind LITE is that it was totally unplanned. LITE was not on our “product roadmap”, so to speak. In fact, we didn’t think we would ever do free apps. Call us crazy, but we still believe in the concept of charging a (non-zero) price for our products. Ridiculous, right?

So then why did we create LITE? We were heads down, thick in development, trying to get our updates to Hippo Pro and Hippo Basic out the door when we started hearing about this Touch Mouse app on Twitter. It was by Logitech and it was free and people were tweeting about it left and right. So we took a look…

As indie developers, we know how tough it is to create an app of any kind, especially with limited resources. We have great respect for the work of our fellow devs. But a global multi-billion dollar company should be held to a higher standard in terms of polish and attention to detail. And Touch Mouse, well, even for free it still left a bad taste.

We thought we could do better and more importantly, we believe customers deserve better. And so LITE was born. It has the same ultra-smooth trackpad and smart keyboard as Basic and Pro, with two-finger scrolling, pinching and international language support, as well as Wake-on-LAN, Split-Screen Mode, and Shake-to-Toggle keyboard access. And it’s easy to add more functionality via the built-in Hippo Store.

This is our first foray into free apps and we really don’t know anything about how this half of the App Store works. We might be doing everything wrong. If so, let us know! (Some of you already have. ☺) We want to hear your thoughts on the matter.

What does this have to do with Basic?

Even after we decided to create LITE, we were so focused on finishing development and getting our apps out the door that we never stopped to consider its impact on Basic. We just forged ahead with the original plan. Now that we have a moment to step back and survey things, it’s apparent to us that we need to make some changes…

Basic originally was intended as a low-cost way for people to get to know us. The way App Store pricing has gone, $5 (for HippoRemote Pro) is considered expensive and people understandably don’t want to get taken by an unknown developer. So it was important to keep the price low. But we wanted to offer the new plugins we created. So we decided to make them available as in-app purchases.

Now that we have LITE, the original pricing motivation for Basic is moot. In fact, Basic as a whole seems a bit redundant. So the question is: What should we do with it? Should we even keep it around? One possible option is to drop Basic entirely. But that would strand all our existing customers, which we won’t do.

When do we get to the part about FREE PLUGINS?

So this is what we’ve decided to do. With our next update to Basic, we will include all the plugins — Browser, Twitter, & Boxee — as standard components. No more in-app purchases. We will also raise the price of Basic from $1 to $3 — a 25% “bulk discount” over upgrading LITE piecemeal.

In the meantime, we will continue to keep Basic at $1. This means you can buy Basic now for $1 and get the Boxee, Browser, and Twitter plugins for FREE when Basic is updated. You can still buy the plugins now if you really need them right away. But if you just sit tight and wait for us to finish coding and testing, and for Apple to approve the update, you’ll get all that functionality. For FREE.

Hmm…maybe we’re starting to get this “free” thing after all.

Hey Linux folks, thanks to Mark Crowther, we now have a MythTV profile. Grab it here.

We don’t talk a lot about Hippo Basic, and I’m not really sure why. We’ve worked hard on it and I’m very happy with the end result.

Lots of apps in the App Store have a base version and a pro version, where the pro version is the base version with more features. Hippo Basic and Hippo Pro certainly have many overlapping features, but we also put features into Basic that are not in Pro. Why? Because we don’t view Basic as a lesser Pro. We view the two to be complementary apps.

Pro is obviously optimized for controlling media Macs and PCs. It’s designed for one-handed operation, like the traditional remote control that everyone is accustomed to. And though they are there, in the majority of my time using Pro, I never need to access the keyboard or trackpad.

Basic, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach. With the full-screen arrow pad, it can work extremely well as a remote, but it’s first and foremost intent is to be a fantastic replacement for your keyboard and mouse.

In other words, Pro is a remote with keyboard and mouse functions. And Basic is a keyboard and mouse with remote functions. The difference is subtle, but this is the perspective that informs our design choices.

That said, what’s new in Basic v2.0? 

First, big enhancements to the trackpad. We’ve redone the gesture handling to be more responsive and more accurate. And we’ve added even more multi-touch gestures. For example, Mac users can now activate Expose, show the desktop, or switch between open programs with four-finger swipes, just like you can with the multi-touch trackpad on MacBooks. Windows users the the same functionality, and you don’t even need to buy a Mac!

Second, you can now assign keyboard shortcuts and macros to gestures. This is a great productivity enhancer since you can execute frequently used commands without having to switch to the keyboard or hunt for buttons.

And lastly, we’ve included the Hippo Store where you can purchase the Boxee, Browser and Twitter Plugins we introduced with Pro. You can pick a la carte the features you want. Want to use our fantastic Boxee gesture pad, but don’t need all the App Profiles in Pro? Now you can!

Note that Plugin purchases apply to your iTunes account. This means if you run Basic on multiple devices, purchasing the plugin once will enable it for all of them.

It was a rather long and winding development process, but HippoRemote Pro 2.0 is finally done and available in the App Store. So what’s new? What changes did we make that deserve the 2.0 label?

User-Created Profiles

For anyone tracking our blog, this one is pretty obvious. We’ve been beta testing user-created profiles since our last update. Beta users have created and shared profiles for EyeTV, SageTV, SlingPlayer, Spotify, TotalMedia Theatre, and more. And with 2.0, these profiles are now available to all. You can download them directly into HippoRemote from our web repository.

Browser Plugin

Wait, did I say download from the web inside of HippoRemote? Yes I did. We’ve integrated a web browser into HippoRemote. This makes it super easy to access our profile repository. But it can do so much more. How many times when watching a show, do you see an actor and instantly wonder “where have I seen him before?” And you’d either have to pull out your laptop or exit HippoRemote and start up the iPhone browser to do your search. With our browser plugin, you can access IMDb and Google directly inside of HippoRemote. No laptops, no switching back and forth between apps.

Furthermore, actor searches are just the tip of the iceberg. You can also read your email, update Facebook, check sports scores and even chat with friends via web-based instant messaging sites like Meebo. It’s total access to the web with total convenience.

And what if you’re browsing and come across a video or photo you’d like to see on your TV? We’ve created a solution for that too! We call it Link Launching. It lets you send links from your iPhone to your media PC, so you can pick the screen that’s more appropriate and comfortable for the content at hand.

Twitter Plugin

Speaking of links, I get most of them through Twitter. And while Twitter’s mobile web site is quite nice, I’ve been spoiled by the performance and capabilities of the iPhone’s native Twitter clients. Scanning my timeline via the web interface feels slow in comparison.

Lots of web pages, however, are just plain hard to read on the iPhone’s small screen. I’m constantly zooming in and out and panning left and right. And since the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, tons of video links don’t do anything at all. Wouldn’t it be great if I could send the links in my Twitter feeds to my computer for viewing on my HDTV? Sort of sounds like Link Launching…

So to make this all just work, we’ve also added a native Twitter client to HippoRemote. It’s not meant to be a full-featured Twitter client, but we do support a number of convenience features that most dedicated apps lack. Auto-expanding shortened URLs so you can tell where a link is taking you BEFORE you click on it. Thumbnail previews of TwitPic and YFrog image links. And of course, Link Launching for letting you view the content you want on the screen that you want.

Boxee Plugin

You might be sensing an Internet theme to all our new features. There’s just so much cool stuff happening with the convergence of Movies, TV, and Music with the Internet. And Boxee is one company that’s really leading the way. We love the philosophy behind Boxee and we love their media center software (minus some of the bugs). And so we wanted to show our love with something special.

If you run Boxee, you’ve probably tried their iPhone app for navigating the interface. It’s gesture based and quite slick. What we’ve done is tried to take it to the next level by adding multi-touch and a number of usability tweaks. Like momentum. So you can scroll long lists with a single flick. We also pull cover art from Boxee so you can tell at a glance what’s playing.

Quick Macros

We’ve added all this stuff, but how do you access it? The Browser and Twitter Plugins don’t really belong to any particular profile. They should really be available at any time. And so we created Quick Macros. These are five customizable macros that you can access from any profile with a quick shake of your iPhone. We’ve pre-programmed them with the Web and Twitter Plugins, as well as some other useful macros, but you can edit them to suit your own needs.

Aside from big new features, we’ve also gone through and refined every existing feature as well. I can’t really remember every change, but off the top of my head:

• Improved trackpad multi-touch recognition.
• New 3 & 4 finger multi-touch gestures.
• Landscape trackpad option.
• Customizable long-tap gesture.
• Scrolling momentum option, like the Apple Magic Mouse.
• Tracking momentum option.
• Option for auto-pausing playback on an incoming phone call.
• Larger button targets for all existing profiles.
• New profiles: Movist, Opera, Pandora, The Sixty One, Zune. (Yes, we work with web apps too!)
• Speed optimizations.
• Network optimizations.

I hope you’ll agree that Hippo Pro 2.0 is a massive update. Most other developers add one new thing and call it a major release. That’s just not our style. But more importantly, we want to let you take advantage of the iPhone’s capabilities and open up new ways of interacting with your computer. I hope you enjoy it! And as always, please send us feedback, both good and bad. We’d love to hear about what’s working for you and what isn’t.

***** IMPORTANT! *****

If you are using our HippoVNC server you MUST update to the newest version.

See our previous post for notes on potential gotchas.

HippoRemote Pro 2.0 has been approved and should be available shortly in the App Store, if not already. This was the fastest approval we’ve ever experienced! Needless to say, we were caught a bit by surprise. A post detailing all the new stuff in 2.0 will be coming shortly.

In the meantime, Mac and Windows folks, if you’ve chosen to use HippoVNC, you MUST update to the latest version.

Windows folks: Be sure to uninstall HippoVNC as a service and make sure that the server isn’t running (no icon in the task tray) before upgrading.

Mac folks: Before replacing HippoVNC.app with the new version, make sure to shut down the system server if you are running HippoVNC in the background.

UPDATE: Profile creation is no longer in beta! Grab all available profiles here.

From Zak Beck, a SlingPlayer profile for Sky+ and Sky HD receivers. This may not work “out-of-the-box” for other receivers, as we’re not sure if the shortcuts are the same. But since Zak’s done the heavy lifting, it should be much easier to tweak the profile for your specific setup. You can download the profile here.

Profile creation is not quite out of beta yet (it will for our 2.0 update!) so you’ll need to send us an email to get it going.

We put this notice into the What’s New section on HippoRemote’s iTunes page. But it’s buried at the bottom and so I think people might not see it.

In HippoRemote 1.2.2, we added support for multiple monitors, but it also required us to update HippoVNC. If you’re getting a Connection Lost error right when HippoRemote goes to the trackpad, you need to update to the latest version (0.2.1). You can download it here.

If you’re using OS X’s built-in Screen Sharing, then please ignore everything I just said.

UPDATE: Profile creation is no longer in beta! Grab all available profiles here.

Thanks to JodyOne for a Spotify for Mac profile. I love the subtle glow highlights when a button is pressed. A beautiful touch. You can download it here.

As before, you’ll need to join our profile creation beta to be able to use this profile. Simply send us an email to join.