At home I use XBMC to watch movies / TV shows and listen to music on my TV. Thanks to the huge plugin repository, I'm also able to use it to browse several video websites like Youtube, Zapiks or Red Bull.
While being a software developer during the day, I am also a photographer on my free time. It means that I like watching the work of other photographers. Firstly, because I enjoy stunning pictures. Secondly, because it is a great source of inspiration.
500px is a wonderful site featuring talented photographers and high quality work. That is why I was very happy when Patrick L Archibald released an XBMC plugin for 500px eighteen months ago. Unfortunately, while being functional the plugin was quite slow and limited. It was not possible to browse the site by category or to perform a simple search. You could choose which feature to use, but it required a painful user experience. You had to terminate the plugin, go into the plugin settings, change a value, then start the plugin again.
Last month I decided to give a look at the source code, learn the XBMC API, and see what could be done. I then rewrote the plugin from scratch and added several key features:
- Navigation by feature and by category
- A search mode
- Navigation and thumbnail loading is much faster
Patrick merged my pull request into his repository a yesterday and the new release just hit the XBMC repo. Enjoy !
To install it, follow the instructions on the wiki. The plugin is available for v11, aka. Eden, and later.
Thanks to Patrick for his work and to Akira Hirakawa for his Python-500px library (If you read me please merge my pull request. I hate not being able to send my patches upstream ;).
I plan to add more features in the future. I want to be able to log in and to support at least the like and fav actions. More to come.