HippoRemote Blog

So Apple caught us a little by surprise. Not only did 1.2 get approved weeks faster than any previous release, but it also was approved on a Sunday! Looks like some people over at Apple are working overtime.

Anyway, HippoRemote 1.2 is a really big update. We’ve added a bunch of stuff, applied more polish to nearly every aspect of the app, and of course, fixed some bugs. We’ll be posting in more detail about what’s changed in the next few days, but here’s the short list of new features:

* New Profiles. By popular demand, we’ve added profiles for VLC, PowerPoint, Keynote, and Gmail.
* Auto-Connect. This saves a lot of time if you only connect to one machine. And if you’ve entered the MAC address, HippoRemote will also try to wake up the machine using the built-in Wake-on-LAN functionality.
* Macros. It’s not really feasible for us to track every available shortcut in every supported app. With Macros, you can now add any we’ve missed. Furthermore, Macros let’s you create sequences of shortcuts so you can automate any repetitive tasks.
* Landscape Keyboard. For those of us who need the extra space.
* Unicode Support. We now support all the languages available on the iPhone. Note that you’ll need to use HippoVNC (our customized VNC server) to enable this feature. See the setup page for more info.
* Proximity Sensor Support. To save battery, enable the Proximity Sensor setting. When you’re not using HippoRemote, simply flip your iPhone on its face to disable the screen.

And our favorite new feature:

* Automatic App Launching & Switching. Another feature that requires HippoVNC. Now changing a profile automatically launches the app or switches to it if it’s already open.

One more thing…A lot of you have asked for the ability to create your own profiles. We’ve added it, but we’d like to gather some more feedback before making it broadly available. If you’d like to try out profile creation, please send us an email at our support address. Note that to get the most out of profiles, you’ll need an image editor as well as a text editor.

After over a month sitting in Apple’s review queue, HippoRemote’s 1.1 update is finally available in the App Store!

Along with some connection fixes, 1.1 adds Wake-on-LAN support. It’s pretty annoying for us to finally make it to the couch, only to realize we have to get back up and turn on the TV computer. Wake-on-LAN solves that problem with the caveat that your TV computer must be networked via a wired connection. See the FAQ for more details on getting things working.

In the 1+ month since 1.1 was submitted, we’ve found (and fixed!) some more bugs. And we’ve been hard at work adding new features. For example, we’ve added Auto-Connect, for those of you who primarily control one computer; Macros, so you can create your own keyboard shortcuts and automate common tasks; and we’re currently wrapping up Custom App Profiles, so you can create profiles much better than ours for all your favorite programs. For the international crowd, we’re also dramatically improving support for non-English languages.

We’ve also been giving HippoRemote an extra layer of polish and refinement. We’re revisiting existing features like Drag Lock and Circular Scrolling and tuning them to be even more useful. And we continue to tweak the look of HippoRemote. It’s not our style to be super flashy. We prefer understated elegance and we’re working to get there.

So the question remains…When will this all be ready? I had wanted to release new features (and bug fixes) as they were finished — basically a release early and release often approach to development. Given how long the approval process is, even for updates, I think it makes more sense to make each update more substantial. This means more testing. 1.2 is getting close, but there’s still a little more to go.

Until then, enjoy 1.1 and Wake-on-LAN! And send us your thoughts, comments, and feedback either on this blog, via email, or on Twitter.

If I handed you an Apple II, you might arch an eyebrow, but you’d instantly recognize it as a personal computer. This despite the Apple II being a piece of technology over 30 years old. And you would know how to control it, easily identifying the keyboard as the primary interface. What you would probably have a hard time with, however, is getting any work beyond basic text editing done with it.

Form-wise, PCs have evolved modestly. Yes, manufacturers now use all sorts of new materials, but the basic blueprint is almost entirely unchanged – a screen, a box, and a keyboard (with a mouse). Functionally, however, the capabilities of PCs have exploded. Even as recently as a decade ago, PCs were primarily tools for work. Word processing. Spreadsheets. Now, productivity apps are secondary features.

What is a bit surprising, though, is that despite this massive growth in functionality, the devices we use to manipulate PCs have hardly changed at all. The keyboard in particular has remained amazingly constant. The keyboard you are using right now probably has a few extra keys, and possibly a [different][dvorak] [layout][colemak], but is otherwise identical to its ancestors. A clear sign that keyboards have been caught in an evolutionary stasis? When a noted geek enthusiast recently [replaced his keyboard][aek2] (after 14 years of use!), he replaced it with an [identical model][pics] he had stored for safekeeping.

[dvorak]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard
[colemak]: http://colemak.com/
[aek2]: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/04/29/aek2
[pics]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gruber/sets/72157604797968156/

Why has there been so little progress with keyboards? The same reason the PC form factor has changed so little – most of the advancements happen in software. It’s so much easier to try out new ideas in code. And so apps that rely heavily on the keyboard have bundles of smart, productivity-enhancing features. Every programmer is intimately aware of code editing tools in his/her IDE of choice. Shell users feel naked without tab expansion and command history. Power emailers swear by text expansion utilities. And web surfers are cushioned against repetitive stress injuries by filtering and auto-completion in the url bar.

But have you ever wished that some text feature in Program A also existed in Program B? I often find myself wishing that command history were available everywhere: simply press up a few times to retype a recent string of text rather than switching out of my current app, selecting, copying, returning, and pasting. Or that url bar auto-completion was available when emailing links.

These kinds of cross application keyboard smarts have been generally unsuccessful because it’s really hard to do without an excessively burdensome user interface. It would help keep things cleaner to push these features into the keyboard rather than clutter the operating system further. But this is infeasible since there are no mass-market keyboards with such hardware capabilities.

Or are there? Smartphones are incredibly capable devices and while we primarily think of them as standalone devices, I think increasingly we will use them as mechanisms to interact with and control other devices. Like PCs. In developing HippoRemote, we put a lot of thought and effort into making the iPhone keyboard even smarter. As you can guess, the design is heavily inspired by command shells and browser address bars. What can we say? We are geeks. But we think these are features that everyone will find useful. We also tried to take advantage of the iPhone’s built-in smarts by displaying the layout most appropriate to the task at hand. Hopefully someday Apple will give developers more control over customizing the keyboard so that we can take things even further.

But whatever Apple does, we’ll still be working to create smarter practical input devices. Consider what’s currently in HippoRemote a small first step. We’ve got more ideas to try and more experiments to run.

Your application, HippoRemote, is requiring unexpected additional time for review. We apologize for the delay, and will update you with further status as soon as we are able.

Sigh…

Most remote control application choose to implement their own communications protocol but we opted to build on VNC instead. Why? It’s true that building on a standard gives you instant compatibility with a bunch of platforms and devices. But for us, it was a no-brainer because Macs and Linux PCs have great built-in support for VNC.

As we well know, nobody hates software more than software developers. It’s very true that the best choice of software is often no software at all. Why force our users to install yet more potentially buggy software when that functionality already exists in their computers? And relying on built-in functionality makes setup a breeze. It’s literally a handful of clicks and typing in a password.

Unfortunately, life’s not so simple on Windows. Without built-in VNC support, our users must install a third-party server. And while there are plenty of excellent options, none of them are all that easy to setup and configure.

So we created our own solution. Actually, we took our preferred VNC server (UltraVNC) and modified it, via the power of open-source software. We’re calling it HippoVNC to avoid confusion, but we’re just standing on the shoulders of the UltraVNC team.

HippoVNC is a standalone executable. We’ve already pre-configured the settings. All you have to do is download, run, and enter a password. See the setup page for the details.

We’ve also added the ability to auto-detect HippoVNC. You’ll never have to manually enter a connection again. But you will need to have iTunes installed, which I’m guessing all you iPhone and iPod Touch users do.

So to all our Windows users, switch to HippoVNC and give us your feedback! We think it simplifies things quite a bit. We hope you do too.

When setting up a connection to my HTPC, it’s really annoying to have to find/input the IP address. And if you ever have to reboot your router, it’s likely all your IPs change and suddenly your saved connections no longer work.

Here’s a simple solution. Install iTunes. Actually, you want to install Bonjour for Windows, but it’s generally installed automatically with iTunes. So if you’ve already got the latest iTunes on your Windows machine, you’re done.

Now, to connect to your computer, append “.local” to the end of your computer’s name. For example, if you named your computer “HTPC”, when adding the connection in HippoRemote, use “HTPC.local” for the name. No more hunting for IPs!

Even though we had to wait a long time for Apple to let HippoRemote into the App Store, we weren’t sitting around twiddling our thumbs. Today we submitted the 1.1 update to the App Store.

We made a couple of UI tweaks, like making the Login Manager a little prettier and requiring confirmation before clearing keyboard history, but the feature that warrants the point update is wake-on-LAN support.

I don’t want to say anymore right now. We haven’t had the best of luck with the App Store process, so I’ll wait until things are a little more certain before going into more detail.

After over a month in ASRL (App Store Review Limbo), HippoRemote has finally been cleared for launch! Please help spread the word, or better yet, demo HippoRemote to all your friends and convince them to replace their cable box (and their expensive cable subscription) with an old or inexpensive computer.

Also, keep an eye on this space for HippoRemote news, tips & tricks, and general info on expanding and evolving world of media and home theater PCs.