Forum Upgrade

I've set my eye on improving the forums, expect them to be quirky for the next couple days.

Adult Scripts

A new Adult category has been created on the site. To view this category you must be logged in and also have to confirm that are an adult.

There is a demand for adult scripts, and as history as shown, most people are willing to pay to access adult material, so it's a good opportunity for developers to earn some cash and it grants access to these sites.

To be honest I'm not super keen on having an Adult category and if it becomes even an ounce of trouble it'll be gone.

Personal Scripting

XBMC has finally resolved whatever issues that was affecting the menu switches on my machine, and I can finally get back to updating my scripts

PlayOn More

Let's see, first things first, we can now recover our login information if we forget it! Goto the login page, click the Forgot Info link, and enter your email address. I can't believe it's taken me this long to implement this!

Also coming soon PlayOnScripts will become PlayOnMore. Now that the site has Plugins and Scripts, I think it's time to reflect that with a name change. I'm not sure when I'll make the official switch over but when I do decide it will be seamless so nothing gets lost or interrupted.

Meanwhile PlayOnMore.com already points to the site and, after you login, will be cross compatible with PlayOnScripts.com, meaning everything you do at one site is reflected at the other as well.

Also developers need not to worry about their hardcoded urls in the scripts, it will be all good, I promise.

Domain Renewel

Domain expired, didn't know it, friend bought it for me as a gift last year. Got in touch with him and he renewed it, let the DNS catch up for it to go back to normal.

Recommendations

Gold Members now can get some recommendations based on their own subscriptions. I wouldn't compare the results to, say, the NetFlix Recommendation Engine, but it should help expose us to some scripts and plugins we may not have known existed.

It's a pretty simple "algorithm" (for the lack of a better term) that compares your subscriptions to other people who also subscribed to the same scripts and plugins. From there it compares those users' scripts and plugins to each other and, based on a percentage, returns any of them that are ranked highly.

I decided to limit this to Gold Members because it's rather database intensive.

Website issues

Not sure if anyone else is experiencing these issues but I'm having trouble accessing the website at the moment.

Going to see if I can contact some folks.

Database Errors

Today I came home to find out that a database error was injecting itself into download scripts and plugins, it was my error. When I began converting the site to allow plugins and scripts, without separating the two, I had to go through the code and remove the redundant code. Today I found a bit of code I didn't clean up and removed it. Turns out it was kind of essential.

My apologies to everyone but all is well.

Script Manager Numbers

Less than a month ago I re-released the Script Manager script under the new title Manage Scripts. It's the first script on the site to be available for a fee, I did this for a couple reasons. The first reason is to just test the waters, it only costs $1.29 (and not $.99 because google takes a flat $.30 per transaction), I've always been curious if people would pay for PlayOn Plugins/Scripts. The second is to give something extra to Gold Members, and it was originally only going to available to as a part of the upgrade. The total sales, added up, isn't amazing but about 30 people have decided it was worth it so far.

And, thanks to crawl9992, we have our first non script on the site, he added the TNT Plugin yesterday.

Free Gold upgrade for developers

Developers with more than a couple scripts have had their account upgraded to Gold. It's not that big of deal but it's the right thing to do.

Going for the Gold

I've enabled Gold Accounts for those of us who have some extra cash and wouldn't mind paying a little bit for some added convenience. I'm asking for $10.00 a year, which is $0.83 a month, not outrageous but let me know if it's too much.

The money from Gold members goes towards maintaining and improving the website. If, by some miracle, lots of people upgrade their accounts I plan on sharing some of the extra cash with developers. That being said, if you only have a few dollars to spare, I'd much rather people considering upgrading donate to a developer instead.

Scripts for Sale

Developers now have the option of charging for their Scripts or Plugins. Developers can get more information here.

What's this mean for users? I don't suspect we'll see a lot of scripts for sale but I personally will be testing the waters with a new Script Manager script. I plan on charging $0.99 cents for the script, we'll see how it goes.

You got your Plugins in my Scripts!

Even before I started writing one line of code for playonscripts.com I tried to keep in mind that one day I'd like to use the same software to host plugins. I must admit that I hoped to join forces with Onyx over at playonplugins.com and work out some revenue share type of deal but it never came to fruition.

Today I started to think about the differences of Scripts versus Plugins and to be honest, now that the scripts plugins in default, the only real contrast is where we save them on our hard drives. So I began the process of allowing plugin developers the ability to add their plugins with our scripts. The site will be smart enough to know the difference and react accordingly.

I don't know if the plugin developers will use the new additions but I'll do my best to get the word out.

Site Design

I'm trying to 'soften' the design of the site, so don't be surprised if you notice some changes.

Landing Page and Subscription troubles

I found some bugs in the subscription process that has been ironed out, it was something really simple and I can't believe I overlooked it.

Also in order to inform people about the subscriptions; from now on when we click the "Download" links on a script's page we'll get redirected to a landing page with some additional information. It'll also come in handy if I ever need to let the user know about something in the future.

And one last thing you may notice is that on the home page there is a little News section now which should also help to get the word out about new features.

Subscriptions

It seems that I forgot to turn on subscriptions for everyone. It's been complete for months but I had it locked for not admins so I could test it and just forgot. Well it's open for everyone now, enjoy!

Everything is blue...

it's true.

PlayOnPlugins.com - Down

Saw this today at playonplugins.com:

.... Hacked, will be back up when i can fix it.

-Onyx

Bad news.

[Website] Subscriptions Coming Soon

You'll notice a new icon next to your name if you're logged in . Clicking on it will take you to a blank (for the moment) subscription's page. Soon we'll be able to add a script to our subscriptions page and find out easily when the last time the scripts were updated.

New Developer's Script

I've added an updated version of the Test Script (now named Developer Script). Check it out in the Dev Center

PlayOn Premium for Devs

I had made the suggestion that current, active, developers should receive a free premium upgrade and I supplied our email addresses (with a little bit of data) to someone in charge.

And it was sort of confirmed, but I'm not really sure, that they will be taking my advice.

Even though Scripts are still the red headed step child, I supplied them with some actual Plugin devs email addresses too!

Where has the Log file gone?

right here:

Each script now has it's own log in %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\MediaMall\[script].log

in windows XP I found it here C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\MediaMall

Win7 32bit it is located in C:\ProgramData\MediaMall\

[Website Update] Auto inclusion of images

In preparation for the upcoming release of PlayOn with Scripts included by default, all Scripts being downloaded from now on will automatically be including the site icon image. There will be some documentation coming soon.

Take that Plugins!

The Future

I guess it was announced here that the Scripts Plugin will be rolled into PlayOn and be available by default to all users, which is good new for everyone.

Plugin development was frozen in late February and, to my knowledge, was integrated without any alteration. A couple other things were implemented as well (a better options dialog, and embedding images into scripts).

I'll still be distributing the plugin until the updated version of PlayOn is released, and of course will be maintaining the website.

[Website Update] Messages

Over the next few days I'll be rolling out a messaging system for the site. It will automatically notify us when our scripts are reviewed, commented on in the official forum post, or updated (complimenting the new feature that lets multiple people maintain files and scripts). I might eventually open it up for direct user-to-user messages.

Website Update: Maintainers for files

If you upload a file to the website (just files for the moment, Scripts will follow soon) you can now Update the file to allow others to update the file as well.

[ Updated ]
Scripts can now have multiple maintainers as well.

1 Million Downloads

The site just reached the pretty significant milestone of 1,000,000 downloads. Thanks everybody!

Consider donating

Over at PlayOn Scripts we now have over 120 scripts, which amounts to hours upon hours or content for you to enjoy. You know what it also amounts too? Hours upon hours of development and maintenance time provided by your friendly script writers.

This post is to let you guys know that the script writers are doing all this for free. I know some people don't care, which is fine, and I know some people don't have expendable income, I can relate, but if you really like a particular script take time to see if the developer has a Donation link posted with their scripts and send them a few bucks. It'll help keep these fine folks interested in maintaining the scripts, and they deserve it too.

Options Window

Since the beginning when I first conceived of the idea for the Scripts Plugin I've been trying to come up with a way to give us the ability to let the users interact with the script from the PlayOn window. My first attempt just confused our users, and the second attempt is just a band aid.

But I've been working on a way to let us have options on par with "normal" plugins. This came to head with a good link provided by hotTamale (script developer extraordinaire) here. It goes into great detail dealing with accessing C# options from Lua.

I'm getting tired so to cut it short I'll just leave you with what the new options code will (probably) look like:

--[[Options
    --#code
    --load the assemblies
    luanet.load_assembly "System.Windows.Forms"
    luanet.load_assembly "System.Drawing"
    --assign the objects (#include controls can supplant this)
    Form = luanet.import_type "System.Windows.Forms.Form"
    Button = luanet.import_type "System.Windows.Forms.Button"
    TextBox = luanet.import_type "System.Windows.Forms.TextBox"
    Label = luanet.import_type "System.Windows.Forms.Label"
    Point = luanet.import_type "System.Drawing.Point"
    --create the objects
    frmDialog = Form()
    txtZip = TextBox()
    lblZip = Label()
    butClose = Button()
    butApply = Button()
    --controls
        lblZip.Text = "Zipcode: "
        lblZip.Location=Point(20,20)
        
        txtZip.Text = "90210"
        txtZip.Location=Point(50,20)
        txtZip.Width = 150
        
        butApply.Text = "Apply"
        butApply.Location=Point(250,180)
        --button click handler
        handler=butApply.MouseUp:Add(function(sender, data)
            --apply code here
            Log(txtZip.text)
            frmDialog:HideDialog()
        end)
        
        butClose.Text = "Close"
        butClose.Location=Point(280,180)
        --button click handler
        handler=butApply.MouseUp:Add(function(sender, data)
            --reset fields and hide window
            frmDialog:HideDialog()
        end)
    --form properties
    frmDialog.Text = "My Dialog Box"
    frmDialog.Width = 300;
    frmDialog.Height = 250;
    frmDialog.HelpButton = true
    frmDialog.MaximizeBox=false
    frmDialog.MinimizeBox=false
        
        --assign controls to our window
        frmDialog.Controls:Add(txtZip)
        frmDialog.Controls:Add(lblZip)
        frmDialog.Controls:Add(butClose)
        frmDialog.Controls:Add(butApply)
        
    frmDialog:ShowDialog()
EndOptions]]--

The future

Just wanted to give a quick update about the plugin. Hopefully soon they'll be some big changes, all good, and nothing anyone has to worry about. I guess in the meantime I'll be tweaking some minor code and adding some stuff.

There won't be a whole lot of releases (if any) until the changes mentioned above are made. So don't think that I'm abandoning the project, just doing some internal stuff!

Version 1.0 and stats

Version 1.0 is on hold until we can get our hands on the new way PlayOn is capturing the screen/audio. After we do a whole new world opens up for us.

We now have almost 100 scripts to choose from, between those scripts there have been nearly 400k downloads, and the top downloaded script is well above 10k downloads. I don't want to put down the plugins but... I think there may be 20 of them total? Go Scripts! :)

PlayOn - Hulu switches to screen capture

It looks like MediaMall has switched it's Hulu streaming to the Screen Capture method they've used for Netflix.

As developers this probably means that the screen grab technology may finally be coming to us in the form of some API changes.

0.9.0.0

I just released 0.9.0.0 I'm starting to get a little busy with other matters so I wanted to make sure this gets out. There may be a small update in the near future. The Debug Logger is currently broken and I'm trying to get it working. In the meantime: enjoy.