Sorry guys,
Have been AWOL for a good while
Right, bad news...
Runtime querying performance (MCWS, last.fm, tmdb, TheTVDB) was so bad (making the theatre view UI really unresponsive) that I decided the only way I could make mc:ux work was to have a 'background' process constantly creating/saving images on a timer in the background, and leave the only 'live' images based on playing now info.
Sort of worked, but I didn't like the fact my service was effectively building loads of stuff in the bg, which ultimately would never even be seen, as it would be created and overwritten before anyone ever saw it.
I also got frustrated with the fact I could never target every 'location' the way I wanted...
For those who haven't tried, you use a 'location' variable to determine what to display on a given page, but certain 'locations' are repeated within the traversal hierarchy, but in fact the true path is different, and so the same 'location' logic displays images etc I didn't want displayed in that scenario.
Anyway, it all annoyed me enough I stopped temporarily to see if I could code a 'complete' theatre view interface using nothing but MCWS.
This was going really well... Looking beautiful, data enriched, nice user interaction, just felt good.... Until I hit a brick wall ensuring 'focus' changed correctly.
Effectively I wanted MC to run in the background all the time... except when I kicked off a video.
Then I wanted to be able to start playback in display mode until the video stopped (manually or natural end) and then MC back to bg and get focus back.
Almost impossible
So I've now given up on that too.
Long story short, I've given up with theatre view.
I've spent my spare time over the last 3 weeks learning objective-c
I have an alpha, and will be releasing a jremote competitor before I grow old and grey
Sorry guys