Pure Web Remote Control or Listening Audio with switched off TV

[joshua.lyon]

(10-15-2009 10:40 AM)pompon Wrote:  It's just a hobby anyway... I mean is there a sense to start without a guaranteed finish.....

I think most of us can appreciate the fact that this is a hobby. Keep in mind, I developed a PCH application with thousands of lines of code as a hobby in my spare time.

(10-15-2009 10:40 AM)pompon Wrote:  

(10-14-2009 03:13 PM)joshua.lyon Wrote:  ...but you could fairly easily manage them as css/image packs.

Have you ever try to make CSS-s that looked _equally_ even on all the desktop browsers. ;-)
CSS-s of mobile devices are more “unexpected”.

Yes, I work with Microsoft web technologies in my day-to-day job so I know all about the pains of cross-browser compatibility...

(10-15-2009 10:40 AM)pompon Wrote:  The CSS based approach is clear and reasonable, but... well.... how could I explain. The purpose of the skins is improving appearance. Correct? So the skins are better to be prepared. The more prepared skins the better. A skin management/creation tool even exposed to a big community is hardly a substitution of the prebuilt skin set. Need a sample? XBMC (as the first came into my mind).
How many _usable_ skins do you know? One? or two? What is the total amount of the skins?
Even (extended) gaya skin may be another sample. I’ve tried one, two and then reverted back to the default…. I mean there should be a strict reason for trying to substitute a good prebuilt skin set with a home-brew (in this case) management tool. Don’t you think so?

I completely agree that it's often hard to beat a prebuilt set of skins for an application...

You have to admit that XBMC and Gaya are both highly customized and have their own specifications whereas we are talking about web-technologies which are very open and (should be) standards based. You could use a similar comparison against Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal or plenty of other open-source web tools which have a HUGE following of popular, end-user built skins. On the other hand, those communities are much larger than the following for PWRC... so you are probably right that there won't be many people begging you to allow them to build a skin for your app. You're much more likely to see people begging YOU to build the skins.

It's your application so you can choose to do whatever you want with it, but I just wanted to provide some feedback on options you could use if you did decide to try to build skins/themes into your application.

PS. I ended up building some really basic remote control functionality into my own application, but with the intention of it being used on a desktop browser. I'll probably end up cleaning it up at some point and making it mobile friendly, but my priorities are similarly driven by my own personal needs.