Hi guys,
I have been working on a project for the past week and a half or so and it is at a point where I would like to share it. Plex and PMS are great applications and I use them every day. I run PMS on a headless Mac Server and when I have to do any management I normally use the PMS web interface. Wile the web interface is very useful I find it slow and clunky. I also find that it is missing options that the native cocoa media manager has. I was originally going to create a post asking if we could make the cocoa media manager work remotely but then I began to wonder if instead I could just build one, and instead of making it purely for managing the media, I could make it into a versatile remote system for laptop users. Below are some screen shots of my work, there is still allot that I want to add but surprisingly allot of the core functionality is already working. Please leave any feedback.
So below we have the main view for the Manager/Remote
The colored bars below the posters represent there ratings and are fully editable.
If you click on a poster you get a popover view with more information and the ability to play the movie on a plex client.
A close up view of the popover below,
The text field for the summary is fully scrollable.
If you want to get to other libraries on the PMS server click the menu button in the top right corner and the screen slides to reveal your options
Your PMS server name is displayed at the top of the list and all available libraries are below it. You can change servers using the settings menu which is accessible in the usual place as well as with the settings icon at the bottom left of the application. A closer shot is below.
The manager caches all images to the local disk making it fast to load large libraries after the first time. Of course if an image changes or you do a media refresh on PMS the manager will also pick up the change.
Sometimes you will want to control the plex client on your tv directly rather then just by selecting the media from the managers browser. To help facilitate that for those with laptops and mac mini/ mac pro clients/ pc clients I have built in remote.
Simply select your client from the list of available clients and go. All of the buttons should be very self explanatory accept one, the one that looks like at tv. Below is an image that tries to capture what it does.
The tv like button opens up a window that will take a screen shot of your plex client after each button press to show you your current window. I use plex to play music and I like to keep my tv off when I am doing that, this view makes it easy to still control plex remotely from the other room and see what I am doing. It has also proven helpful for when I am just listening to the tv but working in the other room and the episode I was listening to has ended. Below is a cleaner view of the remote with its remote view.
So thats the application I have been working on for the past week. Its coming along very nicely and over the next few days I hope to finish implementing support for TV, Channels, Music, and Photos and then finish up the editing capabilities of the manager. Unless I get permission use them, I also plan to create new images for each media section type.
Anyway please leave comments and suggestions. I am hoping to release this by mid september at the latest.
