Alex of TiVoBlog alerted me to his most recent post. He noticed a recent post on the Galleon forum by a John Kohl, stating that Galleon development is going to restart.
For those who don’t know, Galleon is one of the most, if not the most, popular TiVo HME applications. It was developed by Leon Nicholls as an evolution of, and replacement for, his original JavaHMO application. However, Leon was disheartened by TiVo’s lack of support for Home Media Engine, and he decided to give up developing Galleon with the release of version 2.3.0 on April 15, 2006. Galleon has languished since then. It is still a nice application, but it hasn’t had any new features added, and it doesn’t support the HD display capabilities of the Series3, as some newer HME apps do.
The good thing is, Leon created Galleon as an open source project. So the source code is openly available for anyone to pick up and carry forward. It sounds like John plans to do just that.
Galleon development is restarting. Goal #1: learn the source base, get up to recent source releases of third-party components.
Goal #2: HD applications
I’m happy to see this, HME is one of the things that sets TiVo apart from other DVRs, and Galleon is one of the leading examples of what it can do. One of my other favorites is Apps.tv.
I would like to see TiVo update the public HME API & SDK, and provide more support for HME developers. But, as I reported from CES in January, TiVo doesn’t have any immediate plans to focus on the public HME environment. HME is being used extensively internally – recent additions such as the TiVoCast, KidZone and Guru Guides, and Universal Swivel Search applications are all written using an internal version of the HME tools.
The recent publication of Beginning TiVo Programming
