What's Going On: April Fools - Non-Technical Edition

It’s been a bit over a month since last we let you in on the inner workings of the Team, so we figured it was time to bring everyone up to date on some new and slightly less new developments. Today it’s going to be technical-light, but we promise next week to provide some more interesting tech news.

First off, as many of you know, and as quite a few of you commented on with great anger and furious vengeance in your hearts, we managed to pull a little prank on everybody. For the record, we are not closing our source, we are not partnering with Sony, no one is letting us stream Bluray quality movies, and only our users are giving us any gifts, which is exactly how we like it, since those gifts allow us to give back quite a lot (we think) in return! Also, we are happy to say that about 4,899 of you were really curious to see just what kind of movies Sony was letting us stream. The “Bluray Streamer Addon” was the 4th most popular addon for the 3 days it was available. And those “streaming movies” were viewed 14,422 times… Clearly, somebody out there REALLY loves Rick Astley!

Second, smart people managed to port XBMC onto ARM and Intel based versions of MeeGo a while back. Now folks over at MeeGo Experts have posted a demo video of XBMC in action, and, as you can see, video playback is already quite smooth. Some may have been wondering what was next for MeeGo with Nokia’s Windows Phone 7 announcement, but given the recent announcement by The Linux Foundation and a few big name participating companies, things are looking pretty exciting for MeeGo.

Next, if you haven’t already heard, Martin Ellis (Malard) and Pulse Eight are making the very first dedicated XBMC remote control with the intent of donating a portion of each sale to the Foundation. Visit the site for the specs. Needless to say, the Team wishes him well in his endeavor. Hardware that’s specially purposed for XBMC is invariably appreciated. Plus, donations are alright!

Finally, beginning next week, XBMC hopes to begin a Feature Friday, in which we invite you, the user, to submit a story about your setup, along with a few pictures. If you’ve got a full-on batcave or a dorm room you’re proud of, we’d love to see it. No guarantees that we’ll publish any of it, but we’ll definitely try to sneak you in if either you or your setup is cool or funny or really, REALLY terrible.

That’s this week’s roundup. Next week, we’ll focus on some technical things that a few of our Team members have been working feverishly to make happen (occasionally even with the much appreciated support of our users! Thanks much!).

Edit: Ah, apologies to all! If you’d like to send some pics and a write up, email them to [escapeemail email="[email protected]"].