Navaho Gunleg

Trying to get acquainted with the development of OS X Dashboard Widgets, I wrote my first one ever this weekend, one that controls a MythTV front-end through its network control interface (i.e. telnet).

I run MythTV, the open source PVR in my network for quite some time because, well, timeshifting rules. And, of course, a mythological convergence box rules. But it occasionally leaves me searching for the remote whenever I quickly want to pause the music when, say, somebody calls me on the phone.

Having a laptop within reach most of the time (and most importantly: being lazy), I should not have to go looking around for the dang remote, now should I? That’s what they wrote that network control interface for, I guess…

So that’s why I wrote this widget; basically what it does is this: it connects to your MythTV frontend (through using the command telnet) allowing you to control your front-end much like you can with a normal remote — the main difference being that this one does it over a network:

The widget as it appears on your Dashboard.

Features
- Uses ‘telnet’ to control any MythTV front-end available over TCP/IP.
- Clickable, and configurable, icons for most jump-points.
- If you enter the edit box next to the ‘Send raw keys’ text, the widget will capture keystrokes and send the appropriate ‘key’ command to the front-end so it is possible to browse through the menus, skip through recordings, change typos in MP3 tags in the music player, et cetera.
- Regularly queries (every 5 seconds) the front-end’s context to display what section in the front-end is active.
- If you are not using, it can be sized to a smaller size by clicking on the title. If it is restored to its original size and the connection has been lost, it automatically re-connects.

Known bugs
- Not all jump-points are implemented (yet).
- When changing an active configuration, you need to explicitely hit ‘Power’ to disconnect, and again to re-connect to the new address.
- The ‘Send Command‘ select box may become obsolete as it now is (currently, it is used to display [hard-coded] context-sensitive keystrokes, but this could well become a configurable box in the future because not everyone has the same key-settings.)
- It can’t turn on your TV set.

Download
Download version 0.3 BETA  This version fixes the bug mention by Phil; I accidentally set the maximum length of the edit field for the IP address of the MythTV server to 12 in stead of 15. It should now accept all IP addresses.
Download version 0.2 BETA  Note that this is the first ‘public release’ of the widget so, yeah, the code may be crap and, yeah, it could definitely contain bugs.