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 …