Beyond Media update (Nov 19, 2004)

[rakeshagrawal]

First, I have some exciting news to announce in this update: After lots of hard work from our team (which includes our developers, testers and our marketing team) and our external beta testers, we've reached the GM (gold master) stage in development on Beyond Media. At this point, we are nailing down some final licensing and marketing items, duplicating CDs and other fun stuff. Some time next week, we will be announcing the official Beyond Media launch date.

I want to spend time in this update talking about Beyond Media plug-ins. As I alluded to in both my October 14 update and my November 10 update, Beyond Media will include a very powerful architecture for 3rd parties to build plug-ins against. There are three plug-ins that will ship built-in to Beyond Media:

• Firefly Settings
• Weather
• Caller ID

I've posted screenshots and brief descriptions of each of these plug-ins below.

In addition to the plug-ins included with Beyond Media, there will be a number of 3rd party plug-ins available in the SnapStream Developer's Network (SSDN) at the time of launch. Among the plug-ins that have already been written by the community are a mixed drinks plug-in (that has been named "Beyond Drunk" ) and a comics plug-in. There are a few other really cool plug-ins but I'll leave them as a surprise for the launch.

Now some technical details about the Beyond Media plug-in architecture: The Beyond Media Plug-In architecture gives plug-in developers access to the same objects that the SnapStream developers used to create Beyond Media's different modules (photos, music, DVD, etc.). By allowing access to these objects, adding new screens is a snap. In addition, when plug-in developers want to create a new widget, inheriting from any of the base classes makes it easy to do so. And stay tuned for the Beyond Media SDK -- it will guide developers through the wonderful (and easy) world of Beyond Media Plug-Ins. If you are interested in getting early access to the Beyond Media SDK and the SnapStream Developer's Network, PM Brett.

Discuss this update here.

[rakeshagrawal]

Beyond Media supports caller ID functionality out-of-the-box. The overlay window shown displays the caller name and the caller number (they've both been blurred out because PBMax was afraid he'd have a bunch of people calling him. )

[rakeshagrawal]

Change Firefly's settings from the Beyond Media Settings page (this is an example of a Beyond Media settings plug-in):

[rakeshagrawal]

Beyond Media's weather plug-in in action (we're in for some bad weather this weekend in Houston! )

[rakeshagrawal]

One of the community plug-ins that's already been developed for Beyond Media dubbed "Beyond Drunk":

[rakeshagrawal]

Another one of the community plug-ins that has already been developed, the comics plug-in:

(first screenshot is the Comics Settings screen where you choose which comics you want to "subscribe" to, the second screenshot is the main Comics screen where you can scroll through all of the comics)

[Brett]

I added some images of my BeyondMedia plugins that use BTV here:
BTV using BM engine. Just 1 of several plugins. (screenshots included)

-Brett