Passion Project : Evolution of Chromemote
Just when I think the end is near, Chromemote's weekly user count tripled to 33k users. It has been a wild ride over the last two years building Chromemote. The continuous effort to push Chromemote forward took me across the country and taught me many useful lessons along the way.
This all kicked off just over two years ago after a 3DayStartup event. Since then the project led to me getting into two student startup accelerators and winning multiple Imagine Cup awards. Ultimately led to me landing an awesome lead developer position with an interactive design studio called Bouncing Pixel, where I get to spend all day building all kinds of cool stuff including my own apps and startup ideas.
At one point I was crazy enough to think I could work on this project full time and quit my job. Despite many awesome users contributing, I was unable to maintain this as a full time effort. I am still dedicated to committing as much time as possible to keeping the Chromemote effort going, but I will need support from Chromemote's users.
This has been a passion project that I want to continue to thrive. For this reason I have decided to open up the source and to enable anyone to contribute by commiting code. Fix bugs, improve performance, add features, and pretty much anything you want to. Push your code back to the public repo and I will merge your changes into the live version. I know there are many people out there that really love Chromemote and with your help we can keep it going.
The End is Near? : Google TV and NPAPI deprecation
Although my grand vision of GoogleTV embedded within every smart TV never really took off, I still really excited of the future of the Android platform on televisions. With the announcment of Android TV, many see this as Google TV's death, but I see it as a rebirth. In this spirit I plan to carry over all the Chromemote efforts to support Android TV devices as well.
Why is the end near you may ask? Well Google has officially ended support for the use of NPAPI plugins within Chrome Extensions. Although we started developing Chromemote all the way back in December 2011, it wasn't until Google I/O 2012 that a NPAPI plugin was released to allow Chrome extensions to communicate with Google TV. Some engineers working on Google TV had seen what I was trying to do, and with their help Chromemote was became a reality. Two years later and the plugin has become incompatible with Chrome.
Seeing this coming, I built an alternative way of enabling Chromemote to communicate with Google TV devices. This new solution using the Chromemote AnyMote Bridge is less eligant than using the NPAPI plugin because it requires users to install an actual app on the Google TV before it will work. The development of this being rushed and with limited Google TV devices available for testing, it does have some bugs that need to be worked out.
All of the source code for the Chrome extension and the Google TV bridge app are available on our github page. If you want to get involved, then don't hessitate to pull the code and to hit me up anytime.
The Future : Android and Android TV
I have nearly completed porting the Chromemote experience to an Android app. Because of time restrictions it has been put on hold, but I would love to finish it up if there is actually any demand. So I have set a tip jar goal of $1 for every active user. If I can raise just $1 for every active user, then I will be able to delay any other side projects and focus on finishing Chromemote for Android as well. If this is something you are interested in, then jump over the the support-us page to leave a tip in the tip jar.
We are really excited about Android TV and the second screen posibilities that will come along with it. We have already applied to receive an Android TV ADT-1 developer kit. We hope to get as much of a head start as possible with supporting Android TV devices.
Code: github.com/MoteLabs
Comments: chromemote.com/support-us
