It’s Valentine’s Day at Boxee and users are already feeling the love. Of course, we never want to leave out our developers from our affection, so I thought I’d rap a bit about our support for HTML5.  

We feel strongly that the future of TV apps is a cross-platform one, where developers write code once and users enjoy the experiences across multiple devices and screens.  HTML5 can create rich experiences across many platforms on the desktop, on mobile devices and – of course – in the living room.  We’re on board with this new standard and would like to invite you to try your hand on building an HTML5 app on the Boxee Box.

Setting up an HTML5 app is super easy – just three steps!

1) Creating the descriptor.xml

Like RSS and skin Boxee apps, HTML5 apps start with a descriptor.xml.  Let us first consider this example.

<app>
  <id>example</id>
  <name>Example HTML5 App</name>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <description>An example HTML5 app using the new Boxee browser.</description>
  <thumb>http://example.com/thumbnail.png</thumb>
  <repository>http://dir.boxee.tv/apps</repository>
  <media>video</media>
  <copyright>Example, inc</copyright>
  <type>html</type>
  <url>http://www.example.com/html5app</url>
  <controller>http://example.com/boxee.js</controller>
  <platform>all</platform>
  <minversion>1.0</minversion>
  <test-app>true</test-app>
</app>

There are three new important values and one new element we introduced just for HTML5 apps.

• <type>html</type> – This element defines the Boxee app as an HTML5 app.
• <url>http://www.example.com/html5app</url> – Like in RSS apps, we use the url element as the link to our HTML5 application.
• <controller>http://example.com/boxee.js</controller> – A new element in the descriptor.xml, the value for controller should be the link to your Javascript control file.
• <minversion>1.0</minversion> – HTML5 support is a feature only available in Boxee 1.0; setting this value ensures that the app will be visible only for Boxee 1.0 clients (e.g. the Boxee Box).

2) Creating the Javascript controller

Along with HTML5 support, we’ve introduced a new browser mode to our Javascript API making it super simple to use the Boxee Box remote with your HTML5 app.  Called keyboard mode, setting this in your Javascript controller file now allows you to produce simple up/down/left/right navigation in your app with only three lines of Javascript code:

boxee.apiMinVersion=7.0;
boxee.reloadOnPageChange = true;
boxee.setMode(boxee.KEYBOARD_MODE);

3) Installing your app on your Boxee Box

Follow the handy and dandy new testing instruction we have available on the Developer wiki.

Enjoy this new feature of the Boxee platform and comment with your experience.