The fine folks over at Miso have announced a developer competition and are extending a warm invitation to the Boxee family to compete.  Miso serves up a piping hot social TV platform for checking into your favorite shows, earning points and badges while discovering what fun stuff your friends are watching.  We share a lot of users in common and now they’re rolling out the red carpet to our development crew to kick out some tight social TV apps.

Here’s the skinny:

Deadline: 10 May 2011, noon Pacific Daylight Time.

Prize: A brand spanking new iPad 2, ready for our upcoming Boxee iOS app.

Rules: Must leverage the Miso API to do something awesome.

What kind of awesome can be built with Miso and Boxee?  Oh how about some of these tasty treats:

• Auto check-ins on Miso when you watch shows on Boxee
• Change show on Boxee based upon what your friends watch in Miso
• Notification when a new episode of a show you follow on Miso is available on Boxee
• Check out your friends’ favorite shows
• Leave notes on shows for your friends to see
• A Boxee app hinting on how what would be best to watch to earn Miso badges
• Create an auto-running playlist Boxee app based on Miso trends

The ideas just fly off the fingers.  More details are available at the Miso blog including their sign-up form.

As usual, I’m here to make sure you win.  Hit me up on IRC at FreeNode at #boxee, on Twitter at @boxee_api and via email at rob [at] boxee [dot] tv if you run into any snags.

Go get ‘em!

Here at Boxee we pride ourselves in being the open alternative to other television partners and this philosophy extends to our development community.  Developing apps on Boxee is and always will be free for anyone who wants to bring their content to the platform.  Distributing these apps occurs through two mechanisms – the Boxee App Library and third-party repositories.   Let’s take a look at both of these two options and why one is likely preferable to the other for your Boxee app.

What is the Boxee App Library?

Also called the “App Box” and the “main repo” on the forums, the Boxee App Library is the default app repository pre-configured on every Boxee install.  Every app in in the Library is vetted and approved by Boxee’s Quality Assurance team, ensuring every user can be confident that the experience he/she will find in the App Library will be great.

What are third-party repositories?

In addition to submitting to our App Library, developers have the option of adding their own repositories using our open specification.   Just as any one can build an app on Boxee, anyone can build a library for Boxee apps.  In keeping with our open source culture, this gives our community an option available on few other development platforms (and fewer still for the TV): the freedom to control the distribution of their work.

Why should my app be submitted to the App Library?

With the ability to distribute your software yourself, some developers wonder what the benefits are to submitting their app to the App Library.  There are three big wins that the App Library brings to every app:

1) Visibility

A very strong majority of Boxee users never install a third-party repository.  This creates a gate between Boxee’s 1.1 million user audience and your app.  By submitting to the App Library, you ensure that every single user of Boxee can access your app without having to follow any instructions or encounter any obstructions.  All the most popular apps on Boxee are distributed through the App Library.

2) Quality Assurance

Like many other app ecosystems, each app that is published in the App Library gets screened by Boxee’s crack Quality Assurance group.  Coding always means bugs and even the best among us let some get through the cracks.  There is no one in the Boxee community as adept at finding bugs as our QA group and their assistance will always ensure a better end product.

3) Maintenance Tools

Every developer that submits their app to the App Library also gets access to our tools to maintain apps, most notably JIRA.   As the central bug tracker for all things Boxee, this means that users can submit quality bugs for your app, giving you instant feedback on the app’s function and quality.  In addition, you can integrate your IDE with Boxee’s JIRA install quickly and easily with tools like Mylyn, giving you even easier control over the maintenance of your app.

In short, the Boxee App Library gives your app the distribution, the tools and the tender-lovin’-care it needs to thrive in our wide development ecosystem. In addition, it is super simple!

How To Submit:

Submitting to our App Library is easy and transparent.  All you have to do is follow the Application Submission process found on our developer wiki.

Your app with then get into our queue and you will start receiving communication from our QA group within 1 business day.

We’ve invested significant effort in our submission process as of late.  While we feel we still have a way to go before we are satisfied, we strongly believe that it is more open and transparent than many other submission processes developers have to endure when making the software they love.

As always, I welcome your feedback – find me on FreeNode in #boxee or on Twitter @boxee_api.

A common design element in Boxee apps is that staple of Web 2.0 called the rounded rectangle.  Useful for a number of different interface elements, I frequently get asked how to round the corners of dynamic image controls like thumbnails.

Fortunately, this is easily accomplished with one of the most useful GUI techniques available to Boxee developers: the diffuse attribute.  Available on image controls, diffuse allows developers to apply a mask to their image controls that renders with the image in the app.  The concept may seem confusing initially, but is very simple in practice.

Let’s take for example on of my first Boxee apps, Associated Press.  On the left side of the interface the thumbnail image for the currently selected listitem is displayed.  Pictured here, the edges seem a little sharp and harsh to the eye – a perfect candidate to smooth out with a rounded rectangle.

To create the rounded rectangle, first we need to create a mask image.  In the image editor of our choice (the GIMP for me), we create an image the same size as the image control we are looking to mask, 480×360.  Then we create a white (FFFFFF) rounded rectangle inside the image and save as a transparent png.

Next we need to apply this mask to the image control to get the rounded look we are after.  Consider the XML for the image control without the mask.

<control type="image">
	<posx>24</posx>
	<posy>177</posy>
	<width>480</width>
	<height>360</height>
	<texture>$INFO[Container(111).ListItem.Thumb]</texture>
</control>

Adding the mask is super-simple – just add the diffuse attribute to the texture element.

<control type="image">
	<posx>24</posx>
	<posy>177</posy>
	<width>480</width>
	<height>360</height>
	<texture diffuse="mask.png">$INFO[Container(111).ListItem.Thumb]</texture>
</control>

And viola – the image is diffused with our mask, rendering the part of the image we want (the white rectangle) and cropping the part we don’t (the transparency) producing a much smoother look.

The best part about using the diffuse attribute is that it scales with your image controls on multiple resolutions, making your image control render accurately on any aspect ratio.  For more info on how to use this element, check out the developer docs for the image control.

Part of what I love about my home theatre rig is playing music through Boxee. Whether it’s my music library or streaming apps like Pandora and Last.fm, Boxee’s gorgeous interface is the first listening experience I’ve used that feels native to a living room. Music apps continue to be strongly represented in our Top 25 apps each week and with this month’s Music Tech Summit in San Francisco, we see a prime opportunity to up that count even more.

Idan and I will be attending this year’s Music Hack Day to connect with the brightest developers in the music industry and we’re bringing a sack of goodies along. On hand to help hackers bring music services to the television, we’re holding another friendly hacker face-off with a serious prize up for grabs: a Boxee Box as soon as it is available.

This 15-16 May, we’ll be awarding the hotly anticipated hardware from our partners at D-Link to the best music app to be completed at the weekend codefest. And, if that wasn’t enough, we’ll have a Boxee T-shirt for every hacker that completes a Boxee app during the fest.

All you need to win is to get on the waitlist for the event, show up ready to hack, and produce an app that is ear-popping, face-melting, brain-blistering wholesale-monkey-rodeo awesome.

Well, maybe not this awesome…

…but something close.

Next Monday, the May installment of what is becoming a favorite Boxee tradition – JIRA Hug Day!  “JIRA Hug Day” is our internal name for taking one day when everyone in the company – even non-technical folks – jump into our bug tracking software and squash as many bugs as possible.  The result of previous Hug Days can be found evident in the notes of our last release, increasing the overall stability of the experience and enriching our user experience.

This time around, our engineers would like to invite you the Boxee application developer to participate for our marathon squash fest.  Your apps are the crown jewels of the Boxee experience and we’d like to take a day to polish them with you.

Here’s how you can participate:

1) Get on JIRA

You can sign up for a JIRA account here.  This will allow you to create your own filters for your apps, comment on bugs, and watch the issues that are important to you.

2) Make Sure Your App Is A JIRA Component

A JIRA component is created for the boxee-apps project for every app in our main app repo, however JIRA is great for tracking the bugs of apps distributed in third party repositories too.  Your app does not need to be in the App Library to be on JIRA.  If you don’t see your app listed, be sure to email me at rob [at] boxee [dot] tv to get a new one.

3) Grab Some Bugs!

Use this guide to find the bugs that are important to your apps and get to squashing!

My goal for the development community this Monday is to turn the summary for the boxee-apps project upside down, meaning we resolve more bugs than we took in for the month of April.

Hop on JIRA, get plugged in on the forums and on #boxee on irc.freenode.org, and show JIRA, and your users, some springtime love.