Interesting developments in the xbmc space

There was a interesting post from some of the XBMC developers recently. It was a tip of the hat to some secret things they have been working towards.

So Webkit integration is pretty obvious, like Boxee's cloning Mozilla into there later builds. Having a browser built in means access to a lot more the web's resources including things which are trapped inside a Flash container. The DirectX port will just be a version which takes advantage of Windows APIs for display. Makes sense seeing how there is already a Mac only port called Plex which takes advantage of that hardware. Its also worth noting Plex already has Webkit build in. The ARM port is something I wouldn't have imagined, but it makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of ARM based systems out there including smartphones and other electronic devices outside of the usual circles. This also means you could make a really cheap XBMC box with basic functionality. I assume PVR intergration will pick up the effort which was spotty in the past. There has been support for TIVO and a couple other boxes in the past but no real long term effort. The video library redesign is also a welcomed change, don't get me wrong its good but it can be much better and there's talk about mixing it with some kind of supplemental tool to control the media better. I had considered writing a XSL to generate a list of what movies I own and there ratings, etc via conduit sync manager.

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Prezi, my thoughts

Everyone is loving Prezi, people are totally raving about it. But I have serious problems with the technology behind Prezi.

As far as I can tell Prezi generates a huge flash file which is bad enough but on top of that is it seems to suck everything into it and nothing much seems to come out. So for example it can injest pdf file, images, text, movies, etc. But can you export to a presentation file which people can take away? Can you export to a printable for format? Can you export to a movie? It doesn't seem very clear from any of the information I have seen. In actual fact you can only export to a format which requires another Prezi player, to play it back! The business model is also worth mentioning, 119 dollars a month for version which includes offline editing but not much else. All the payment grades are tied to there online storage too, which is very expensive for what you get. For example how would you pay for 2gig of storage? Certainly no where up from 30 dollars, which still assumes the offline editor is worth 90 dollars. From a Data Portability angle this is like the spawn of satan surely? And I'm sure from a open source and free software angle, this has got to have Tim Oreilly and Richard Stallman in chills at night? Lastly, what on earth are TED thinking sponsoring this stuff?

I have been thinking maybe some enterprising group of people could take the SVG specification and build a tool which generates these exact same presentations. So first up you can use scripts on every element including the viewpoint attribute. There seems to be a load of things you can do with the Canvas coordinate system. SVG 1.1 has the ability to embed certain multimedia but SVG Foreign Object could be used to place a browser or a complete video within a SVG.

You could imagine a specially made tool which worked like Prezi but wouldn't need to be propitery and locked in. They could even create and sell a player and editor backed with its online space, so the business model isn't totally shattered. Even if a rival tried to create the same, OpenPrezi as I'm coining it would be first to the market and have a wealth of knowledge of what works and what doesn't. Even a track record might go down well. So in my mind, there's no way I will be using Prezi till its a lot more open. I'm sure even I could with a bit of time construct something using the SVG methods I mentioned. I'm not questioning the method or even the concept, it actually reminds me of mood boards. Its the implementation which winds me up.

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