I almost forgot to mention that there's a new feature in 1.15 that a lot of people have been asking for... and that's the ability to jump through the many pages of files that are displayed when you are in "Browse Filesystem" mode.

Simply press any number on the remote control between 1 and 9 and you will jump to the relevant page (1 = first page, 9 = last page).

Well eveyone, I'm back from my holiday in Tanzania and ready to begin work on getting a new release out to you all... I know it's been a while. In fact, I've been back for a week now, but I've had to catch up on a number of things at work as well as doing all the usual post-holiday chores such as washing and ironing!

Also, I got engaged to my girlfriend Chengyu whilst on holiday and so I'm also busy trying to plan a wedding for sometime in the new year... so much to do... why can't there be more hours in the day?

Anyway, I didn't do a last minute release before going on holiday as I discovered a rather nasty bug in the search code that I'd re-factored (which stopped the search working entirely when you entered more than 3 characters)... so I thought it best leave it until my return!

I'll get back into the code now and I plan to do a release during the week.

Rob

Right... Now that my internet connection has finally been restored (8Mb/s whoohoo!) I'm in a position to be able release a new version.

However, there's a little problem.

I go on holiday in a few days, and I'm not too keen on unleashing a new version (which comes complete with new features... and new bugs) and potentially causing you all lots of grief until I return.

So... please cast your votes on the Poll as to what you think I should do.

I'm thinking of adding a feature to the SwissCenter interface to search for music and download albums from an online store. The store I would be using provides legal 192Kb MP3's without any form of DRM protection for an average price of $1.50 per ALBUM (it depends on the number/length of tracks, but that is an average price).

How do people feel about this feature?
Please use the poll on the right to cast your vote...

For those who are interested, the site is www.allofmp3.com - and more information on whether this site is legal or not can be found here
 

I'm currently in the process of adding multi-language support to the SwissCenter and would appreciate help with translations of the english into other languages.

If you would be prepared to help with the translations, please post to the forums as to which language you can help with.

Update...

I've finally finished updating all the code to support multiple languages and the english language file is now available for translation. Those people who have kindly offered their support can now download the en.txt file and begin the translations.
 

I'm currently without any telephone or internet access at home due to problems whilst moving ADSL provider. The only internet access I have is via my work connection or my mobile phone - which means that it's unlikely I'll be able to post any new releases until my home connection is back up and working.

Update (7th September)

Still no telephone or internet service

I'm one of the unfortunate people that decided it was a good idea to move to the 8Mb connection offered by Bulldog. To be fair to Bulldog though, the problems I've had so far have all been caused by BT's inability to connect the right pairs of wires together. I can't really blame Bulldog for that... and there's no way I'm going to reward BT by moving my account back to them, so I guess I'll just have to keep waiting.

In an effort to start supporting more hardware devices than just the Pinnacle Showcenter, I need to establish how each device identifies itself to the SwissCenter.

In the latest version of the SwissCenter (1.11) I have added a list of client devices discovered by the SwissCenter onto the support info section of the Configuration Utility.

If you are using a hardware device other than the Showcente 1000, then please visit the support info section and post the contents of the "Discovered Clients" to the forums in the thread "Hardware Identification". Your help with this will be appreciated, and hopefully your device will become better supported in the future.

If you are currently using the swisscenter then please post details on your configuration to the forums here.

Full Step-by-Step instructions for installing SwissCenter on a SuSE Linux 9.3 machine have been added to the downloads section and are also available here.

In the near future I plan to release a step-by-step guide to building your own storage array using software RAID5 on SuSE 9.3 Linux. The guide will provide instructions for installing SuSE, setting up software RAID,Samba and of course the SwissCenter!

I'm well aware that there is very little documentation available for the SwissCenter (either in the FAQ's section or as a "User Guide"). I haven't even got "What Is It?" or "What Does It Do?" pages...

Now I could spend a lot of time searching through the forums writing FAQ entries, and producing some nice screenshots and guides on using the SwissCenter, but then I wouldn't be spending that time fixing bugs and adding new features!

So, if there's anyone out there who'd like to take pity on me and help out in these regards then please get in touch.

I'm just putting some finishing touches to the Movies section - so that the SwissCenter can automatically download actor/director/genre/year/certificate information from the internet and then you can browse your film collection by any of these attributes.

As soon as this is finished (probably today or tomorrow) then I plan to start work on the photos module. At first, it will be fairly basic - you'll be able to browse your directory structure, view thumbnails and then select a directory for displaying as a slideshow.

Once that is done, the plan is to provide more options such as the play order, background music and time per slide, etc...

As I've now updated the firmware of my ShowCenter, I'll also be adding the ability to display a "Now Playing" information screen for music playback.

The next release will probably be towards the end of next week.

OK folks, sorry there hasn't been much activity on the development of the SwissCenter or the forums lately.. I had a little snowboarding accident whilst on holiday and fractured one of the vertebrae in my spine.

However, I'm on the road to recovery and busy working on a new version.

Thanks to Marco, the installation of the SwissCenter on Windows is now much simpler by installing the pre-packed version of SwissCenter and the Simese media server.

The download can be found on Mattic Software's website here... but please remember to perform an automatic update from within the SwissCenter once it's up and running to ensure you have the latest version.

So what's so good about version 1 of the SwissCenter software?

Aside from the many general ease-of-use improvements present in the SwissCenter software, what are the "killer" features which are useful in day-to-day operation? Having used the SwissCenter as a user on a more or less daily basis I may even have used it more than Rob :O)

I'm sure everyone will have a different opinion (especially Pinnacle!) but here are my personal favourite features, many of which had me thinking "if I wrote this interface, that would have to be in it"...

Development on the SwissCenter continues and I anticipate that the first public release will be made available for windows users before October, with full testing completed on the Linux version sometime towards the end of October.

Take a look at the screenshots section to find out what the SwissCenter interface looks like.

Features that will be present in the first public version include:

• Create, edit, load and save your custom playlists from within the SwissCenter interface - No more manually creating them on your PC.

In addition, the following features are enabled if your ShowCenter hardware and/or the computer on which the SwissCenter interface is running is connected to the Internet:

• Access Internet Radio Stations*
• View Weather forecasts for up to 5 days
• Self-Updating - You can download and Install a new version of the SwissCenter whenever it's available directly from the interface itself.
• Download new UI Styles directly from this website from within the SwissCenter interface.

*Shoutcast Radio Stations are only available if you have upgraded youe ShowCenter firmware to version 1.5