So if you are on Windows, and Remoteless suddenly started to only show the green “Start Spotify”-button, even if Spotify was running, you need to download and install the new helper (v221) from HERE (same link as on remoteless.no front page), and everything should work normally again.

Sorry for you inconvenience, and happy Spotifying!

The poll is now open! Vote for your favorite new feature, and help us decide what to do next. We will try our best to implement the winning feature, if not possible we will do feature number two. This is meant as a big thanks to all of our users, and we hope you use the opportunity. Thanks again, and happy voting!

The other day we (the team) discussed what a great community we have around our little app. It really makes it worth it, and we are really inspired by how much people care, and how glad you are to help us when we ask you to take screenshots, beta-test or send us crash logs. We really get a lot of great feedback from you guys, and we could not have done this without you!

As a BIG thanks to you all, the next remoteless feature will be chosen by YOU!

Round one: Submit feature candidates (started June 24th).

Everybody is welcome to submit ideas, feature requests etc as comments under this thread. We will add them to our list, and try to estimate them, and try to describe if it will work or not. All ideas will be considered, and we will give feedback to all of them.

If you don’t want to post ideas here, mail them to anders@remoteless.no

Round two: Vote! (starting July 26th)

Secondly, we will have a voting round where everybody can vote. The feature with most votes will be our next implemented feature.

Some guidelines:

• It have to be possible (we can only do some magic).
• If you choose a feature that will take more then six months, there will basically be no updates in half a year.
• This is a big thanks to our EXISTING users, so it should be something that YOU want, not for example porting to androide for androide users.

Current list of known feature request:

• iPad version where most screens are visible all the time.
• Playlist sync for premium users. (sync your playlists to remoteless)
• Start Airfoil from remoteless (simple)
• Full Airfoil-controller from remoteless (dont know if this is possible/simple/hard)
• Skinning? (what do you want to skinn, and why?)
• Queue next song(possible) / queue songs(we have tested this, and it will not work that well)
• Related artists (only possible if available from metadata-api, or as a search in last fm)
• Artist radio (Could be possible, ill research)
• Search for current artist / current song (we don’t know what album is playing, so this is all we can do)
• Make UI more iTunes-remote like
• Star songs (probably not possible)

BTW, mac port will be finished before we start implementing this new feature.

-the remoteless team

P.S Letting community decide features is not that common, and we don’t really know how this will work out, but anyway, This is FUN! Now come up with something great!

The update contained:

• fix for a iOS4.0 bug which made remoteless crash on startup.
• fixes of all common crash-logs reported trough apples crash-log system.
• a new “currently playing”-button available when browsing artist/album/track
• a new “back”-button which takes you back to the last place you browsed, so for example if you start a song by an artist, you are one click away from getting back to that artists albums/tracks

The update will hopefully be available within a week, but the apple approval process is known to sometimes be slow.

The whole release-build-signing-packaging-and-submitting was done in about an hour, so our “update”-overhead is now drastically reduces, and we could in theory push new features the same day they are completed instead of batching them up and release them once every quarter.

Please tell us if this new update works, if the new buttons work as expected, and if you got any other stability issues.

Thanks

-the remoteless team

WARNING, If you’re not into beta testing, please wait for the final release of Remoteless for mac!

1. This is not a finished product so it’s not expected to work 100%, but with your feedback will help us to get the final version faster.
2. There will be many updates, so please be sure that you have the latest version when you discover bugs.
3. Please send any issue or bug you find to anders@remoteless.no, a list with known problems will be maintained here, but if everybody reply to this post, it will become mega-big pretty soon.
4. If you don’t have Remoteless already, you need to buy it from AppStore (I only have 35 slots left for free beta-testing, and I need those for other projects). The good thing is that if you buy Remoteless, you support us in getting the full version out, and when we release the final you already have it + you can control the music on your Windows-friends parties’

Installation:

1: Install newest version of SIMBL

Download SIMBL-0.9.7a.zip from here http://www.culater.net/software/SIMBL/SIMBL.php (direct download link), and run the installation. If you already have a working version of SIMBL installed, that should be enough. Remoteless is only tested with SIMBL-0.9.7a, please report if other versions work / does not work. Note: For leopard and tiger users, download SIMBL-0.8.2.tbz

2: Install the remoteless SIMBL plugin

Download + unzip the plugin from here: SpotifyRemotelessPlugin.bundle.zip, and put it into HARDDRIVE*/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins (* your harddrive, “Library” is often translated). Start Spotify (restart if already running), and confirm that it starts / runs without any problems.

3: Install RemotelessHelperOSX

Download + unzip the RemotelessHelperOSX from here: RemotelessHelperCocoa.zip, and put it in your Applications folder. Start it up, and a small green square should show up right in your menu bar.

Feedback:

If something does not work, please take a screen-shot, and send it + remotelessdebug.txt (which should be located in your harddrive main folder) to anders@remoteless.no, and add something about mac in the subject. The more details about the problem you report (what did you do? can you repeat it? when does it happen? how often?), the more valuable your feedback is. Please also tell us if everything works!

Known issues:

1: Stuff isn’t finished yet!

The following stuff isn’t finished:

• Starting Spotify from Remote; If Spotify isn’t running, not much is happening.
• Volume buttons does not work; but the slider does.
• Some have trouble with Leopard; but Snow Leopard should work.
• The Helper-GUI is screwed up; but the buttons work, they are just messed up.
• The installation process will be automated and streamlined in later releases.
• “Run at Startup” from menu does not work, configure this yourself.
• If you close the Spotify window, stuff will not work

2: Stuff isn’t working yet!

We know about the following issues:

• When connecting to remoteless the first times, it takes ages. The remote does not detect the computer, and the “Connecting…”-wheel is spinning forever. This seems to get better after a couple of times. Also seems to work better on Snow Leopard then on Leopard.
• Remoteless crashes, and we think there are some memory leaks.
• Sometimes start song/artist/album does not work until you have started something manually first. Sometimes it works perfectly.
• Volume slider does not work in Leopard… super-strange.

Final words:

Thanks!

We really need your help on this, so thanks a lot for helping out!

Stay updated!

New issues, discovered bugs, bug-fixes and updates will be posted here and will be twittered about.
Thanks, and we hope you enjoy our remote!

Some time ago we were contacted by Spotify asking if we could remove Spotify from the name of our app. The name is now changed from ‘Spotify Remoteless’ to only ‘Remoteless’, and we are hoping that this will not have any impact on our sales.

If you have any idea on how we could reach all the Spotify users with our app please tell us, we are considering renting some time on Spotify itself, but we are unsure about the return.

We will test the new update with remoteless today, and if we find anything that does no longer work, we will release an updated helper before this weekend.

We welcome feedback on what works and does not work with the new update, please use the comment field so everyone can see.

Update

Two bugs are found regarding remoteless and the new spotify. An updated helper will be released this weekend.

1. Starting a playlist does not work any more.
2. Playing all tracks from an artist does not work any more.

Starting album / track will work, and if you start your playlist at the computer, next/prev/pause/play will work.

We hope this lack of features wont cause to much trouble for the next days, and we hope that you understand that we need a couple of days to fix these
kind of problems.

Update 2

We just finished a new version of the SpotifyRemotelessHelper. The new helper patches differences in new Spotify client, and contains some stuff needed for the next Remoteless client (the actual app) update.

New helper is now out and is available from front page http://remoteless.no/

Direct download link: http://www.remoteless.no/SpotifyRemotelessHelperInstaller.exe

First to name all albums and artists will be credited on twitter!

Adapted from kio over at flickr (click image)

BTW We totally agree that play-list support would make Remoteless a better remote. No doubt about it.

As mentioned in our blog post about the Spotify Metadata API, the metadata API doesn’t have any playlist support. It is possible to search for albums, get tracks on albums and these kinds of things, but no playlist information is available.

We have access to some information directly from the Spotify Client, but this is by far not enough to make a useful feature. In a file called ‘guistate’ in the Spotify settings folder it is possible to find the URIs of the play-lists, but not the names of the play-lists, and not the tracks.

There really is NO WAY to get this information right now.

But what would we need?

In order to give a good play list integration we would at a minimum need to know the tracks in the playlist. We would need the URI, and also the name of the playlist. We could simply integrate this so that browsing a playlist would be just like browsing an album on Remoteless. Implementing it would be simple and would be done in a few weeks.

From our feedback we found that even if the current import feature is cumbersome, people do it, and since it’s only done once it’s not a very big problem. What people really are complaining about is that its impossible to browse the playlist tracks, so we might do something with the ‘guistate’ URIs in the future, but currently it’s not enough to make it a solid, useful feature.

In our view there is really only one alternative to the play list support dilemma, and that is that Spotify adds playlist support to the metadata API. This way it would take us (and every other Spotify integrator) a couple of days with development to give you full playlist support trough the remote. We don’t know why Spotify did not include this into the metadata API, but we hope to see it soon. We really really want to make Remoteless as good as possible, and if we could deliver playlists tomorrow, I promise you that we would stay up all night to get it done.

To help, please tell Spotify that the metadata API needs playlist support NOW!

Have you shared the news of Remoteless with anyone?

If so, tell us about it.
If not, do it and then tell us about it.

Competition categories

1. Furthers from Norway
2. Best offline share
3. Best online share

In addition we will pick two random winners, so don’t sweat if you are not the creative type.

Competition prizes

1 month Spotify Premium Gift Card and some small handcrafted surprises.

How to compete

Three ways of sending us your story

• E-mail us on share@remoteless.no
• @remotelessapp on twitter
• Comment on this blog post

Deadline: Wednesday, April 7th