We have been working hard on fixing the ‘play all…’ bug where the ‘play all…’ simply does not work. If you have a mac with 10.6 or better, and have experienced this problem, please try to:

• Download THIS mac 1.1.3 beta helper to your desktop.
• Shut down your already running Remoteless.
• Unzip and start this new beta helper.
• Start some playlists and see if the bug is fixed.

Any feedback is welcomed! Thanks for your patience and help!

- The Remoteless Team

Link: http://www.remoteless.no/helpers/RemotelessHelper_1_1_3_beta.zip 

We need your help!

For a pretty long time we have developed our html 5 remote. Its finally fully working, but since nobody on the team is either a javascript or a css guru, it still have a long way to go. So, anybody our there that can help us get this done a little faster then we can do ourselves? The current version is available, and fully working, but we also want the following:

• Cross browser compability
• Phone optimalization (should look great on an android!)
• Tablet optimalization (should look sweet on a tablet)
• Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger!
• Volume slider

So do you know your css? Is ecmascript your friend, and jsonp your weapon? Contact us and we make a deal! We are willing to pay 500$ for a finished html5 remote. Remember, its already working so its not a ton of work, and this could be a cool spare time project! Also, we will list your name, and we could be a cool reference.

To check it out; download and install the helper from remoteless.no. Enable and open the html remote from the helper dropdown menu. There it is! This is your challenge!

Do you have a friend that might want to help is? Please send a link to this page!

Help us!

We are constantly trying to improve, and we really want Remoteless to be the best, so: What do you want us to do?

We currently have the following ideas, but nothing is decided yet, and we are always listening for feedback!

• A basic wimp extension, allowing you to prev/next/play/pause + coverart + volume your wimp client.
• Full throttle on the Html player, opening for all platforms to use Remoteless (via PayPal).
• A queue system, where Remoteless opens a separate queue window to override Spotify’s queue (only way to do queuing)
• A standalone player (not sure if legal and only for premium) so that you can run Remoteless without the Spotify client (gives better queuing, better control, and smaller setup).
• We have discussed our own audio streaming solution like airfoil, so that your audio could play in sync from all your devices.
• Simplification? Maybe less is better?
• Some sort of social integration where you can access your friends “Now playing” music?
• Harder, better, faster, stronger? Just improve what we have?

A question we often ask ourself, and that was the origin for the web integrations is: “What else do I want to do while listening to music?”

Any feedback is welcome, and we are happy to discuss different use cases, and different ideas! As our users, you are the experts! Help up make Remoteless the best remote ever!

Here is Remoteless and its new gui:

Lets start some music:

Scroll up to access the menu:

Scroll down to access the web:

Go directly to the Last.fm page for the currently playing artist:

Find similar tracks to the current playing with moretrackslikethis.com (no typing required):

Click any spotify link, and it will start on your computer (instead of opening the Spotify App):

Go directly to the photo album of the currently playing artist at Last.fm:

Browse and start top lists from many countries with Topsify.com:

Play Spotify radio with Echoifyapp.com:

Explore the music you are listening to or discover new music, right from your Remote-less remote!

We also want tips on more pages to add, they should load nicely in iPhone Safari, have Spotify links to click, and have to be searchable for direct lookups (We are also trying to include direct lookups at Lyrics.com for lyrics ).

-The remoteless team!

• United States: 73
• Sweden: 72
• United Kingdom: 68
• Norway: 60
• Denmark: 45 -WELCOME DENMARK!, WE LOVE YOU AND YOUR ROSKILDE FESTIVAL: WE GO THERE EVERY YEAR SINCE 2005!!!-
• Netherlands: 17
• Finland: 6
• Germany: 5
• Canada: 2
• Spain: 2
• Mexico: 2
• Australia, Belgium, Estonia, Greece, New Zealand, Slovenia: 1 each
• France: 0

What is strange about this list is that we sell apps in Germany, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Belgium, Estonia, Greece, New Zealand, Slovenia where Spotify ISN’T available.

What is even stranger is that we DON’T sell any apps in France and Spain, where Spotify IS available.

So our big question to you is: France and Spain, Where are you? What are we doing wrong?

A possible explanations could be that Spotify just isn’t big in those countries. Another explanation is that we need to localize Remoteless into French and Spanish. Not a huge effort, but will it help?. Thirdly; well, you tell us!

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

-The Remoteless ‘international’ team (same old team, but now international )

Update 1:

This list compares the iTunes rating of the free Spotify client and Remoteless for all countries, on 15.10.2011. The lower the ratio the better, the Spotify rating should give some sort of baseline for how popular Spotify is in that country, so the ratio is somehow a normalized way of looking at the popularity of Remoteless.

 Its a clear difference here between Group 1: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherland and  Group 2: Spain, Finland and France. The US is so different and so big that we cant know if it belongs in group 1 or group 2. The quest for an answer continues!

Hi all, today is a big day! I have just finished the 1.0.8 beta 1 helper, and I’m really exited about getting it out to the user. The new helper have two huge new features, and of course a long list of bugfixes. So lets start with the features…

Feature 1, New Connection Code:

Many users have experienced that remoteless is slow, and that connections does not work. This is a result of the old connection code in remoteless never really working. It was single threaded, and relied on select() to manage all new and existing connections. The new code is multi threaded, and immediately after I implemented the new stuff, connection time went from seconds to milliseconds. I have also stress tested the new connections, and can now easily run the helper with 10-15 clients connected almost without any delay on commands. So the first part of this beta is to test the stability of this new connection code across platforms.

Feature 2, Http Server:

Ever since we released Remoteless February 2010, people have asked about other platforms then iOS. First they just wanted an iPad version, but now also anriode-client, mac os x-client, etc have been requested. The Remoteless iOS App is actually pretty complicated, and we were not really prepared to develop full native clients for all platforms; That would take all our time ++. Instead we have as of today opened a http API from the remoteless helper. The helper also include a simple html+ajax client that can run on anything with a web browser.

Since we still want something back for all our hours spent on this project, the helper needs to be activated to allow access to the more complicated commands. For testing, each restart of the helper allows 10 commands like next/play/playlists etc, to be executed. Good for testing, but really bad for remote controlling.

Currently our plan is to sell activation keys for 10$. These keys will let you activate helpers on 3 computers in your home, and will let you control these computers from any number of devices you wish to. Basically you get full house control for 10$.

In the beta period, you get your activation codes by mailing anders@remoteless.no with the exact subject line ‘BETA ACTIVATION CODE REQUEST’. These codes will probably stop to work some day, and will sometimes be unstable. I’m not giving out hundreds of codes, so don’t get upset if you don’t get one.

Now its up to you! Create the perfect Html5 client, or a simple and nice Androide port. If you create something good, please send it to us, and we include it in the next release. We are happy when EVERY platform has a client! We will gladly pay 200$-300$ for a well done client, mail me at anders@remoteless.no if you want to make a deal.

Stress testing the new helper:

On the next screenshot I ran 6 tabs querying remoteless for stats, search, playlists, lookups every 2 second. I also connected my iPad, and my iPhone as clients, and everything ran really smoothly for 2 hours. Almost no delay when skipping songs trough the whole test. The helper used 25% of my macs total CPU power while under full stress test, but no memory leaks were detected. This is by far the best and most stable helper we have ever released.

Download 1.0.8-beta1 from:

Mac: http://www.remoteless.no/helpers/RemotelessHelper1.0.8-beta1.pkg
Win: http://remoteless.no/helpers/SpotifyRemotelessHelperInstaller_1_0_8_beta_1.exe

-The Remoteless Team.

We have earlier discussed the possibility to open up the remoteless helper for third party integration trough a simple http interface. This way, all platforms could either write a simple webpage comtroller and remoteless could reach a lot more places. This feature would require you to pay a couple of dollars over paypal for a key to put into the helper; We cant just give it away, and then let everybody write their own remote for it.

 A second and new idea would be to turn the current helper into a streaming-center for spotify, allowing any helper to stream its current spotify music to all other computers and devices on the net. The whole setup could then be remote controlled from the iOS remoteless app. Sort of an integrated (and no extra charge) spotify Airfoil, for your home.

The benefits would be the tight integration with the remote, where you would be able to adjust volumes in all your zones directly from remoteless, and where synchronized music all over the house would be super simple.

We will always have bugs and maintainance to take care of, but what do you think about this as the next big step? “Yay!”? or “Stick with remotes and let Airfoil do the streaming!”?

Any thought is welcomed.

-anders

Update:  A first super-alpha screen of remoteless running in a webbrowser. Would make it possible to control Spotify from anything with a webbrowser; even your old Nokia, your Nintendo Wii, or a frikkin Kindle. Http API will also make it simple to integrate remoteless with anything. Just make your own controller if that is what you want! We will probably pay between $100 and $500 for a rich html client, and adaptions of this to fit different smartphones.

The new iPhone app (version 1.7, available within a couple of weeks), supports unlimited playlists and fixes a possible iOS5 issue.
The new helper (for both win and mac, version 1.0.7), fixes the big “start and freeze”-bug, and is also required to get unlimited playlists.

The remoteless-team is now back after a long summer! Please request new features here!

UPDATE: The new helpers are now live trough update, so just select “Check for updates…” from your remoteless menu!

This short solution seems to solve it for most people; Its probably just SIMBL loosing its rights to integrate with Spotify when upgrading, but to be sure:

1. Delete RemotelessHelper
2. Uninstall SIMBL.
3. Delete the plugin located in:
Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/
and/or
[USER FOLDER]/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/

Install it all again.

Arvid

Arvid was the only human to enter, but we had some great entries by teddybears. Who knew teddys were so fond of Remoteless? Both teddybears win a norwegian treat!

Dave

David