We went and got ourselves a dedicated movies view. You can now see what films are running across the channels in one handy view, categorised by year.
Head to the marketplace to update your app.
24th April 2012
Available now, the latest update to our Windows Phone applications gives them a great new look!
It’s all part of our craving to make vuPlan.tv an absolutely first class application, with a look and feel that really sets it apart from the rest.
Let us know what you think - comment here or on our Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/vuplan.tv
Have fun!
Hi Jon - thanks for getting in touch. We’ve a mobile website in the making to get us quickly covering most smartphones. We’ll then look to develop dedicated apps for Android and iPhone soon after.
With all the CES chatter being about connected televisions, you’d be forgiven for thinking the phenomenon was new. I say this because, for a few million people, it’s distinctly old hat. These people are Windows Media Center users and they’ve been used to having a connected TV experience for years, well, sort of.
Windows Media Center is a brilliant product. In fact, its brilliance seems completely at odds with its lacklustre uptake. For a product that’s just sitting there on most people’s computers, and that’s regarded by its users as the best thing to come out of Microsoft in recent years, it’s actually a socking great underachiever.
So if the cosy Media Center club are merrily singing songs around the campfire at dusk, then the hullabaloo of the impending, connected-veg hardware are the war cries of the shiny rebel cavalry lining-up over the hilltop.
And the fights on, because Media Center is to be included in Windows 8. However, the cause isn’t just streaming content, its people, and up until now Windows Media Center has always been somewhat agoraphobic.
That changes today. We proudly announce, vuPlan.tv for Windows Media Center. It’s a first step, but an important one.
vuPlan.tv connects your television viewing experience to everyone else’s. You’ll be able to make viewing choices based on people like you and real-time trends. No more drowning in a sea of irrelevant guide data. No more missing stuff that’s good.
And what’s more, you’ll be able to do this from the train, the queue at the post-office, at your weekly team meeting, or even while answering a call of nature. Yup.
vuPlan.tv Remote Record is the Windows Phone 7 client for our social TV platform and is available today from the UK & Ireland marketplace. We’ve a list of features and surprises as long as your arm while holding a TV remote. One of those posh, elongated B&O remotes.
Hello! Windows Media Center.
Hello! World.
vuPlan.tv™ Remote Record at the Windows Phone Marketplace
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-GB/apps/9ced3f7b-8abe-4694-8259-2aaff70b91f7
vuPlan.tv™ for Windows Media Center®
Variations on a theme: the logo gets squished into a silver box in celebration of the release of the Remote Record premium app. Oh? We didn’t mention? vuPlan.tv Remote Record is available in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace for UK & Ireland customers. You can now remotely schedule your Windows Media Center from our intelligent TV guide. Yowza!
vuPlan.tv for Windows Phone app gets an update!
Earlier this week the vuPlan.tv for Windows Phone had its latest update approved and should be available from the Marketplace hub now.
As well as providing some performance improvements, the update includes our new Now and Next feature, accessible right on the home screen.
Now and Next shows you what shows have started recently, at least that you’ve not missed too much of, and are due to start within the next hour. We’ve conveniently pivoted the data around the show genre, so you can skip swathes of stuff you’re not interested in.
Come to mention it, we’re going to have a bit of a sort out of the genre names since our data provider seems not to agree with us on what constitutes a movie.
The next feature/change for the Windows Phone premium app will focus on finding what’s popular tonight, rather than as a whole.
Your Comments are Welcome!
If you have anything to say about vuPlan.tv features, any suggestions or criticisms, then we’d love to hear them.
Email us at feedback@vuplan.tv
To solve the large payload problem when a recorder has, say, 50 or more recorded shows, a new GetScheduledRecordings method was added to the UserService and MobileService SOAP APIs that accept a modifiedSinceUtc parameter.
Ordinarily, deleted recordings are marked as Tombstoned, so clients should be able to get notification that an item has been deleted and hide the item in the client UI. However, Tombstoned items will eventually be deleted from our servers and so if the client has not updated in weeks, those items won’t come back in the response and so the client won’t know to update their locally cached versions with the news that they’re gone. Thus, it would be prudent to have the client periodically do a full download of the customers scheduled recordings.
The Windows Phone 7 app currently has not been updated to pull new items but work will begin on this soon. Obviously for users, all this is invisible and the app works as normal.
The vuPlan.tv client is pretty stable, generally speaking. However, tonight I discovered a bug, or at least a limitation imposed by configuration. I have run up against the max amount of data that can be pulled from our servers in one go and its because I have 69 shows recorded.
I’ve upped the limit but the new limit means that it could take an age for a device on a patchy 3G connection to pull down its scheduled recordings data. We could change how the clients synchronise so that they use an update sequence number or last modified date on each recorded item, and pulls only new data. The problem with this is that clients need to be told when data has been deleted on the server so the client’s cached version can be purged.
Another approach would be to treat the cause of the problem, which is XML bloat. This involves switching to JSON, a lightweight textual representation of data. I think this approach has more positives for the entire web API, but it also makes me wonder about whether OData would also be too noisey, which is a pain because OData is otherwise excellent.
Hmmm….
Luke
A long time in the procrastinating, I’ve finally pulled my finger out and opened a company blog. I went for Tumblr since its so simple and has great sharey-social type features, which is what vuPlan.tv is all about.
We hope to bring you news and gossip, tell you what’s being worked on, respond to feedback and generally engage with you via this channel in the future. Or now even.
Right, I think that’s about enough words for a first post. Still so much work to do on the main site - the mobile site is getting most attention at the moment since its the small device in your pocket that’s usually there when you need it.
Luke
Err… is this thing on?
