turn your iPhone into a remote control for Spotify

A new app version is almost done. We just found the “crash on return” bug introduced with the last version. Together with a fix for the “hard to hit”-search field, and a new overall norwegian touch; We are happy to soon ship version 1.6!

Here is a new screen; The iPad version will be much much better, and not just a stretched iPhone version.

Send us a summerly picture of you (or a friend) using Remoteless and win Spotify Premium (and maybe a Norwegian treat)!

To compete

1. Take picture
2. Let us know of the picture by doing at least one of the following:
• E-mail the picture to team@remoteless.no
• Upload the picture to our ‘Remoteless in use’ group at flickr
• Upload the picture to our Facebook page

Deadline

Competition ends Monday morning, the 20th of June!

Prices

We’ll hand out one month of Spotify Premium to the person behind:

• a random picture
• the most summerly picture
• whatever else we see fit…

We will favor pictures with actual people in them

For the last couple of weeks we have had a ton of support mails regarding problems with remoteless. This blogpost will try to cover most of the common issues, but will also give some background information to what happened.

The story (skip if you only want the solution):

We recently released a new helper with version number 1.0.5 on mac and windows. This helper had the biggest under the hood updates since our initial helper. To make sure that remoteless would be flexible and prepared for future spotify releases, most of the internal stuff was rewritten, and the CPU usage of the helper should have been reduced to about 10%.

Just a couple of days after the release of 1.0.5, Spotify released a new client (version 0.5.0.xxx). This new client triggered two major issues with the remoteless helper. First of all the GUI changed a lot, so a lot of stuff like coverart broke right away. The second issue was that its internal version number passed 500.000.000, which made SIMBL refuse to load the plugin version 1.2. This second issue was basically a misstake; when we created the first version, the version number was something like 100.000.000, so we just thought that 500.000.000 was a pretty future proof version limit for the SIMBL plugin.

The new Spotify client was not released as an autoupdate for several weeks. This ment that there was two incompatible spotify versions out there, requiring two incompatible helpr versions (1.0.5 and 1.0.6). Since most old users still had the old spotify client, we could not give the 1.0.6 helper as the main download link on our webpage. This made remoteless an unplessent experience for all new users that downloaded the newest Spotify client, but got the old remoteless helper from our website.

Now that Spotify have released the new client trough autoupdate, things will calm down. However, there are probably some bugs in the original big under the hood update of the helper, but now that things are calming down we can start to work on those. As long as spotify changes their client, this will happend time to time.

Correct current versions are:

• Spotify Client: 0.5.0.xxx
• Remoteless Helper: 1.0.6
• Remoteless iPhone app: 1.5.1
• Remoteless SIMBL plugin for the mac: 1.3

The issues:

Old versions: If you got any older versions then the ones mentioned above; you need to update.

Old SIMBL plugin: If you get version 1.0.6 when selecting about from the remoteless helper, and you still get a warning when starting Spotify that the remoteless plugin v 1.0, 1.1 or 1.2 cant be loaded, you need to follow this script:

1. Turn off remoteless helper and spotify.
2. Delete the file SpotifyRemotelessPlugin.bundle from two locations: Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/ and from [USER FOLDER]/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/. Your computer could require a restart for these changes to work, but just try to start Spotify when done to detect if you deleted the correct file. Make sure to turn off Spotify when done with this step.
3. Start the remoteless helper, and run diagnostics. This will start Spotify, and give you all green boxes if everything is ok.
4. If you still have trouble, make sure that you have SIMBL 0.9.9, and try to restart everything again. After restart; make sure that its the 1.0.6 remoteless helper that is started, and not an old one lying around. The helper installs its plugin, so if you delete it, and then start an old helper, the old plugin will be reinstalled.

OS X 10.5: Remoteless officially only works with OS X 10.6, but the older versions have worked well with 10.5. The new big under the hood update probably broke some stuff on 10.5, but we will work on the as soon as stuff is stabilizing.

Lessons learned:

• Our autoupdate feature have to take Spotify version into account. This way we could have given updates only to the people with the newest version installed.
• Our diagnostics page for mac will also have information on spotify version and helper version. This way we could easily post a solution to any version incompability issue on the diagnostics webpage. We might also add the diagnostics feature to the windows version.
• These things happen. Spotify have the full right to change everything anytime, and we cant expect to get full access to all of Spotifys future feature plans. We are trying as hard as we can to make these transitions as seamless as possible for our users, but sometimes things go wrong.

Thanks to all of you for your patience; We will work hard to make remoteless even better, so that those down times feel a little less painfull.

The first Remoteless in use competition had all of five contestants. This includes my cat Smirre and my good friend Eirik, both of whom was gently pushed to compete.

Since Smirre doesn’t own his own iPhone or a computer for that matter he will not get Spotify Premium, but everyone else wins: Eirik, Arvid, Avinash and Andreas.

In addition Avinash wins best picture and will get a Norwegian treat in the good old physical mail box!

See all the pictures on our facebook page or the flickr group.

Avinash

Arvid

Eirik

Andreas

Update 1: New Mac helper just finished; http://www.remoteless.no/helpers/RemotelessHelper1.0.6.pkg This was rushed a little, so please tell us if you find any bugs!
Update 2: New Windows helper just finished; http://remoteless.no/helpers/SpotifyRemotelessHelperInstaller_1_0_6.exe

Original post:
Do not update Spotify!

if you want Remoteless to keep working.

Remoteless does not work with the newest update of Spotify. We have gotten reports today and are working hard to fix these issues.

Remoteless depends on image recognition for some of its features. Because of this larger changes to the Spotify look and feel can potentially break Remoteless, and since we are not Spotify we get to know of these updates through you – our users.

We only need to update the Helper for these sorts if issues – so as soon as it is fixed we’ll release new Helpers. With the newest Helper this is easy by clicking the Remoteless icon and choose “Check for updates”.

So if you really need Remoteless for a party this weekend, do not update Spotify

UPDATE: The competition will only last this weekend!!

We would love to see some pictures of Remoteless in use! So to encourage you, our magnificent users, to send us some pictures we are making it a competition. Send us pictures of Remoteless in use and you can win Spotify Premium gift certificates. We might even throw in some other special stuff Norwegian if the competition gets fierce

Competition

To compete take pictures using Remoteless and do one of the following:

• add these pictures to the ‘Remoteless in use’ group at flickr with the tag ‘comp’ and your country
• send the pictures to team@remoteless.no with the heading ‘comp’ and your country

Deadline

The pictures should either be at the group or in our inbox by Monday morning.

Prices

We’ll hand out one month of Spotify Premium to the person behind:

• a random picture
• the best picture
• the picture series that made us laugh the most

And Norwegian niceness will be handed to whoever we see fit

Example

Remoteless in use

Controlling Spotify from my bed

Terms

By submitting pictures to this competition you give Remoteless permission to use the pictures on the homepage, blog, facebook and/or flickr.

We just finished our new 1.0.4 beta 1 helper for mac, and its awesome!

New features:
All new 10x better spotify integration code; should use 10% of the resources of the older helper.

• Much more precise track/album/playlist startup code. Should work _all_ the time.
• A new mac gui (FINALLY).
• A new update alert system (FINALLY x2); It will notice you next time we update (and send you directly to the download link)!
• An icon (FINALLY x3), and a new statusbar icon.
• A simple installer doing all the setup for you (FINALLY x4).

In fact, the changes are so huge that we really want to do a round of beta before making it an official release.

Please test our new mac helper, and post any success / failure stories here at this blog post.

Update, 1.0.5 is now released! Download full release from:
http://www.remoteless.no/

FINALLY x 5!

And here is the new icon!

Read more…

The Remoteless team have been working hard, and we now got a new team member; Paul Rydon!
Paul has started on the task to help us lift the remoteless graphics to the next level, and things are going great; We could not be more happy with his work!

Her is a small peek, sorry for all the blur

Read more…

This weekend spotify changed their playlist system. This makes it so that remoteless cant find those playlists anymore. We will work hard to get out an update, but this will take a couple of days. Sorry for the trouble, but this could happend every time Spotify change their client.