Souls Army Winter Roadmap 2012

 

Hi there I’m back with an update on what's coming down the pipeline here at Souls Army.

Starting with some improvements, several themes will be updated to work with the upcoming Apollo update for Media Browser. The update addresses several performance related issues and will be a welcome addition for Media Browser users. Many of Souls Army themes will be tailored to work with the Apollo release and will be ready to go when Apollo is made available.

Continuing with our discussion of improvements there are several updates upcoming for our latest theme Neo. We are adding support for channels, more EHS enhancements and some not-so-visible behind the scenes improvements too. Channels is a big step up from the random play feature that was introduced with Neo and has quickly become a favourite here in the tech lab.

FindArt
Was originally a plugin that was created to support Neo by gathering clear logos, thumb art, and other artwork within media browser. FindArt will become an official Souls Army plugin and current plans are to add some bug and performance fixes due out in January 2012. The FindArt plugin will be available to all Souls Army Premium License holders.

Zuper
Is a new Screen Saver plugin in development that will be trialling in early January. This will be our first foray into the Screen Saver area so details are still a bit hard to come by at the moment. However, we will update this space as more information becomes available.

As always those of our users on the Souls Army Premium License will instantly gain access to all our plugins built for Media Browser v2.x as they become available.

WinRT = Windows Really Tricky?

I just spent an hour looking at my code trying to figure out whats wrong when in actuality all I needed was to enable a stupid package capability check box. An hour might not seem like a lot but in A.D.D-Developer-time that is like years!

Arrrgggh.

Time is important spending an hour to debug valid code, with no hint that a stupid check box should be checked, is a total waste. Yes I lack understanding in WinRT and I only stumbled on the solution by frantic Googling but come on.

Note to self - key takeaway:

Jas, if your code looks sound do us all a favor and check the damn Package.appxmanifest options ok?

Layouts

 

Clear Logo Support in Neo with FindArt

Neo features a new locally stored image type for TV series logos. These can easily be found and downloaded from http://fanart.tv/

If you manually want to start adding these to your TV series all you have to do is find one you like from the website linked above and name the downloaded image logo.png and place in the root of the series folder like so.

To make things a little easier Soultaker has implemented an update to the FindArt plugin that will allow you to download these images right thru the Media Browser interface and will do all the naming and saving work for you. So while your waiting on Neo why not try out the FindArt alpha and start getting your logos in place for your series?

Also for those die hard custom artwork fans, you can technically create your own logo.png for seasons as well, but at this time there is no source for these images. So you would have to create them but if you have them in place Neo will show them. These images should be 400x155 in size and have a transparent base.

More info on Neo and FindArt

From the Test Desk 2

Here is a glimpse of Coverflow in Neo with Skin Support and Clear Logo Support.