Bitter is the first Twitter app for boxee. Stefan Hakans built a basic Twitter app that lets you follow the updates of specific users.

the idea of integrating Twitter into boxee and in general to TV viewing experience holds a lot of potential, so i am sure we will see many more apps that will try to make a living-room Twitter experience.

Stefan Hakans in his own words:

I’m Stefan,38. Working as tech lead developing financial systems for an investment bank.

Have been a fan and user of Boxee for a long time but have no previous experience of Python or the inner workings of Boxee apps. Until yesterday (June 14th) that is. I have registered the domain rockboxee.com and am looking to setup an app repository in the not too distant future.

Quote about the app and the experience:

I have been thinking for some time that a twitter client for Boxee would be cool and I always thought someone would beat me to it.

When I yesterday evening could find any info on one and the dev challenge deadline was drawing near I decided to spend a few hour to hack something together. I found the example apps and their descriptions very helpful.

The API isn’t huge and fairly easy to grasp in this short amount of time. I based it on the vimeo example app and got a very simple application just capable of showing the twenty last tweet from a user or the public timeline.

I hope to find time in the near future to expand this app to do things like sending tweets, view your friend timeline, etc. Basically whatever you can do on the regular twitter site.

Moovee Times is all you need before you decide which movie you want to go to. you type in a zip code, get the list of movie theaters in your area, and then you can look at show times, read the synopsis, watch trailers and clips. basically everything you need before making a decision on which movie to watch.

Nate Stoddard used Yahoo! Movies as the source for all the information. i am using Yahoo! Movies when i am planning a movie night. i love the fact that they provide both critics and user ratings. the next logical step would be to offer the user to purchase a ticket. that would be great.

Nate Stoddard in his own words:

I am a software engineer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I started using
Boxee a few months ago.

The Moovee Times application presents movie show times for local theaters.
The user can then learn more about the movie, including the movie synopsis,
rating, and Yahoo! movie grades.  In addition, the user has the ability to
watch the movie’s trailers and clips.

The development of the application took longer then I expected.  I am new
to Python, and while the Boxee API documentation is great, there were
several nuances of the API that slowed the development.  I want to thank
everyone who submitted applications before me.  If I couldn’t figure out
how to do something in the API, I was able to look at other applications
for the syntax.

WellcomeMat is a locally-focused video service that lets people share videos about their local towns. there is real-estate, city tours, news and more.

the app was developed by Nick Verbeck, which put a lot of work into creating a rich browsing experience, including search, tag based navigation, chapter navigation and even built in Twitter integration (so you can Tweet the video you are watching).

Nick Verbeck in his own words:

I’m an almost typical Open Source developer, and I love to spread the good word about Ubuntu. After reading up on Boxee and the fact that it supports Ubuntu as 1 of the main OSes, I had to try it out.

Some WellcomeMat background: WellcomeMat is a locally-focused site for “videos that tell the stories of people and places,” and our goal is to be the video guide to every cool city in the US.

What We Think is Unique About Our Boxee App:

With this first version of our Boxee app, we wanted to give people a unique experience when looking at locally-focused video content and therefore integrated Google Maps. Secondly, because Boxee’s allows us to control video playback with ease, I was able to leverage the “video chapters” that our users enter into our videos. Our chapters allow viewers to jump around the video to the areas they wish to watch (the “master bedroom” of a real estate video for example). As a bonus feature we decided to also include the ability for a user to post a
video right to there Twitter account and share it with all their friends.

In all I hope that you enjoy this app and the ideas that went into it. Thanks to the Boxee team for the opportunity!

the Google Videos app lets you search Google Videos (including sorting by quality, duration, view count, etc.) and is a good addition to video search offered by YouTube.

it is the second app developed by Walter Moore (first was Bass Edge).

Walter Moore in his own words:

Google Videos is my attempt to bring a better video search experience to
Boxee.  When I can’t find a video of something, Google Videos usually can.

On the technical side this application is fairly simple.  The content
displayed in the application is fed by RSS, both the ‘Hot videos’ section
and the search results.  To create the search portion I played around with a
few advanced searches in my browser while keeping track of the request
parameters in Firebug.  Once I had the URL and the params I was able to
begin coding.  I used several other apps for examples, mainly the Songza app
and the Joost app.  I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions about
this app from the Boxee community – http://www.twitter.com/waltermoore

Air Age Media publishes the world’s leading magazines for enthusiasts of radio-control cars, planes and boats. the Radio Control Show app features a collection of webisodes covering the latest news in RC.

Jason Toris works at Cirrata, a Stamford, CT based software and services company. so in case you want to build a boxee apps but lack the tech skills reach out to Jason he may be able to help.

Jason Toris in his own words:

Through Cirrata, Inc., I built The Radio Control Show app for our client Air Age Media. The Radio Control Show overviews the hottest news in RC in a collection of video podcasts. Though still young, expect new sub-shows in the future ranging from news, sports, and how-to videos.

Developing with the Boxee API was very quick and easy. After looking through the API documentation and the code of existing Boxee Apps, I found the process of coding very self-explanatory. Once I got used to the structure of the GUI XML’s, it was easy to add new controls to create the look I wanted for this app. The content is delivered to Boxee through XML files, and I chose which information to display in the list of episodes. The featured content area will change frequently as we decide to feature new episodes and other content. Is easily changed through a separate XML file on our servers. As The Radio Control Show gains new content, I’m confident that I will be able to quickly change this app to account for the new shows.

To find out more about The Radio Control Show and other RC content by Air Age Media, visit http://www.theradiocontrolshow.com or check out The Radio Control Show on Twitter at http://twitter.com/RCShow.

Air Age Media, based in Wilton, CT,  is the largest and oldest (75 years) publisher in the Radio Control (Cars, Planes, Boats, etc.) and Model Airplane Space. http://www.airagemedia.com

Privately-held and based in Stamford, Connecticut, Cirrata serves clients in every industry, and of every size, delivering just the right mix of service and software to make businesses soar. http://www.cirrata.com

I can be found on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jager13579

ABC7 News (KGO) is the local ABC station in San Francisco/Bay Area. this is a great addition of additional news content for boxee (in addition to the existing CNN implementation).

in general boxee needs much more news content. there is great video content of both pre-recorded and live news, and we need to find a way to bring it into boxee comprehensive news experience.

Han in his own words:

I am very new to Boxee but am very passionate about the future of home
entertainment. The application is my first Boxee app and it provides
an easy access to ABC 7 News online video library, including Top
Stories and Most Popular videos. By the way, ABC 7 News is my favorite
source of video news in San Francisco Bay Area and I always wanted to
watch video through a nice tool like Boxee instead of having to browse
through web pages.

While I have many years of software development experience, this is my
first time developing a Boxee app. I borrowed the basic framework from
the existing CNN app in Boxee. So many thanks to the authors of the
CNN app.

Newsbox(ee) is a new way for you to stay on top of what is driving the conversation when it comes to video on the Internet. the app crawls the top trending topics from Twitter and brings the corresponding YouTube videos. the result is a current, interesting and always changing list of videos. a great idea and a simple to use implementation.

the idea of using Twitter has a filter for discovering new content holds lots of promise. discovery on the web is a constantly growing challenge, Newsbox(ee) is a fresh new way to look at the problem.

this is Sacha Arnoud’s second app (first was the C dans l’air).

Sacha Arnoud in his own words:

Newsboxee is a video app that takes the full benefit of the power of internet and social networks. This first version crawls the trending topics from twitter, meshes the tweets with YouTube and presents a unique list of videos that keep the viewer up to date with the very latest, hot news – all from boxee.

pwndcast is an Internet show about the gaming.  the hosts play a different video game each show, talk about it and engage in smack-talk.  these guys are having way too much fun!

i am done watching the first season, and it seems Christian and Puna are making a bunch of changes in the second season. console games. two new hosts. getting out of the studio. should be great.

Christian wants to continue and develop the pwndcast boxee app. maybe add comments, twitter feed, pictures. but even as is it’s a great way to get pwndcast on your TV.

Christian Sass in his own words:

Our app is simply an attempt to replicate and extend the current experience available on pwndcast.com to the emerging set-top market. Currently we are simply pushing video feeds from our site to the app but we also hope to extend the app to be a more brand encompassing portal by including photo and text feeds from our blog and twitter. maybe even having Boxee exclusive content. We feel Boxee is going to be the “next big thing” in New Media consumption, so we had to throw an app in this ring.

we had the BBC’s iPlayer on boxee for a while, which is a great service for boxee users based in the UK (unfortunately users outside the UK can’t enjoy it), but now thanks to Ian Tweedie there is also BBC Live!

as Ian mentions below boxee is lacking in both UK content and live content in general. i hope this is just the beginning and that over the next few months both boxee and the dev community will bring more content in both categories.

Ian Tweedie in his own words:

Well what can i say I’m just a normal guy living in the UK trying my best to find a job whilst using my free time to learn and tryout fun, new things, like coding etc, and the Dev challenge seemed the perfect excuse to dive in, because if that TV isn’t electronic heaven, i don’t know what is.

The idea for BBC Live comes from the fact that apart from the IPlayer there isn’t really a large selection of applications for users outside of the United States.Though this will change in time, i wanted to be the first to bring Live TV to boxee and unless I’m incorrect, i have done that.

As for how easy it was to build, what can i say , i read through the documentation and the sample apps for
about a week or two before deciding to have ago my self, its really wasn’t too difficult, taking about 10 hours. BBC Live is just a simple application that does exactly what it needs to and i hope boxee users enjoy it

“Real men don’t take backups, but they cry a lot.” i don’t know who was first to coin the phrase, but it is very true in my case.. Decho (who offer the Mozy online backup service) are making backup so easy, that you have no excuse to be crying over a drive gone bad.

once you install the Mozy client it will backup your chosen files in the background storing them all in the cloud. Mozy will make sure your backup is up-to-date. there are multiple configuration options, but the default works perfect for me.

the guys over at Decho created a boxee app that lets you access the music and photos that are stored in the cloud. so if you use Mozy to backup your photo and music collection they are now available for you wherever you boxee (access to videos will be offered in a future version of the DechoBox app).

Decho (Tom Metge) in their own words:

decho is growing out of the online backup provider, mozy.  it’s all about access- mozy has the most advanced cloud storage platform in the world, which they are giving to millions of people around the world as a safe haven for their data.  decho brings universal access to the data mozy customer have in the cloud.

dechobox is a both a demonstration of what can be done and a sweet way to make data in the cloud available and useful to every boxee-capable device.  apple tvs around the world will be brought to life with instantaneous access to every photo that their owners have backed up.

it’s a relatively simple application, but i think it does its job well.  only photos and music are enabled right now, but video access will come shortly.  decho really is about *sharing* data, so lots more will be coming.