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Sunday, August 26, 2012

The Technology That Powers Remoku

(1st in a series)

Remoku started as simple enough idea: I wanted something on my phone and pc that could control my Roku. After using some other apps, I decided it would be a fun way to introduce myself to programming for Roku and simultaneously teach myself about the new html5 features, as well other emerging web technologies.

I decided early on that because it was going to be a web app, I wanted to support a broad range of devices, including pcs & macs, phones (especially iphone and android), tablets, e-readers, handheld gaming systems, and so on. That choice helped to define the scope of the project, and would impact many design choices going forward. It meant that the features I could support would be dependent on what the browsers on those devices were capable of. Some devices make it possible to treat a web app nearly the same as a native app, from a user perspective; others still don't fully support web apis that have been standardized for years. Wherever possible, I've tried to make a feature work across a broad range of devices, but I wouldn't ever call it complete :).

So that's my introductory post about the tech of Remoku. In future posts I'll call specific topics such as the html application cache, localStorage, JSON, security, CSS, creating browser shims, and unusual bugs and the eventual solutions to them. While the topics may be geeky, I'll do my best to make the posts accessible for more casual readers.