Miguel,

I'm a bit surprised to read what is essentially a simple support inquiry (with simple solutions) as a 2 star review. There really is no need to do this.

Regarding your questions:

1) AJAX Remote and HTML5/AJAX in general

Other users are quite happy with it:
http://twitter.com/hydroxyde/statuses/11566223790
http://twitter.com/dhanji/status/12400649649
http://twitter.com/loganj/statuses/12401600297
..

HTML5 and AJAX are also used by other serious iPhone applications - including Google Voice and Apple's very own iPhone Help (preconfigured on all iPhones and iPod Touches).


2) native iPhone client
I don't really understand why you're wondering about the lack of status updates. I already told - over a year ago - that

a) the native iPhone client will be released when it is ready to be released.
b) until then there will be no status updates, no preview screenshots and no public time table.

I also explained the reasons for this decision. You can read it in the comments to the blog post you base your criticism on:
http://www.iospirit.com/blog/article/127/AJAX-Remote-after-Remote/

Since this blog post, the AJAX Remote has already been improved a number of times to provide a viable intermediate solution until the native iPhone application is finished. And, as you can see in the tweets above, many users like it.


3) "[..] why can't Remote Buddy auto-detect them and automatically enable the right mapping? In other words, if I launch XBMC with my mouse, auto-detect it and enable the right mapping. At least make it an option."

Remote Buddy does auto-detect and automatically switch Behaviours/mappings ever since its first release in 2006. It also has the option you're asking for. Chances are you made use of this option to turn off auto-detect. The option is located at Prefs > General > Advanced > "Manually activated Behaviours stay active until they are explicitely deactivated".


4) PS3 BD Remote Battery Life

You may be able to get 4-6 months (which neither I nor Sony are saying, btw) of battery life when you keep your remote unused, in standby most of the time and only use it sporadically to start playback of a movie or navigate BluRay disc menus. It is, however, physically impossible to achieve this kind of battery life when you frequently use the remote. If anything, that the range's beginning and end are 2 entire months (yes, months!) apart is a strong indicator that the usage pattern of the person making such claims is sporadically at best, but definitely not comparable with a frequent user. If that person was a frequent user, why would battery life vary by such a large range? Doesn't make sense to me, sorry. This is comparing apples with pears.

Putting that numbers aside: Remote Buddy already provides the maximum power saving options possible: it can shutdown the Bluetooth connection and put the remote in standby mode when it hasn't been used for X minutes. Beyond this, you can only save more power by removing the batteries from the remote. I'd like to highlight that there's also an FAQ entry that provides you with the set of power saving options that provides the best power saving effect. You can find it in the FAQ entry "How can I increase battery life?" in the "Hardware - Sony® BD Remote Control" section:

http://www.iospirit.com/support/faqs/remotebuddy/#faqtoc14


5) Resizable mapping prefs window

Even for remotes like the PS3 BD Remote - which has 51 buttons - you don't need to scroll at all to get to a specific button's entry. To the right of the table is a big image of the remote. By clicking on a button in that image, you jump directly to the entry of that button in the table.

That aside, a resizable mapping prefs window is already on the ToDo list. The fact that it hasn't been realized yet is that there are still other items on it that take precedence because they're of more importance to more users (past examples of this are f.ex. support for the new Apple Remote, Snow Leopard support, ...).


6) Your XBMC issue

> There are quirks with XBMC and possibly Plex. While I understand that this may
> be a XBMC limitation, Remote Buddy should not include something that doesn't
> work. For example in the PS3 remote, the button "Display OSD" will display the
> Music OSD instead of the Video OSD during video playback. Items that don't work

The "Display OSD" action triggers the XBMC action titled ActivateWindow(MusicOSD). To prevent misunderstandings in the future, this action will be called "Display Music OSD" in the future.

I find it a bit harsh to claim that something "doesn't work" (and extend it to other applications in the same go without even having tried) simply because a word is missing in an action name. Fact is this action - like all other XBMC and Plex actions - work reliably.

> should be excluded. And, a workaround should be used, for example include a
> keyboard shortcut instead.

You can create a custom action sending a keystroke if needed. This takes 3 clicks and pressing the keystroke you want emulated. You can find step-by-step instructions in the Remote Buddy Help in the "How-To" section.


7) Your bottom line

> With no iPhone native app after 2 years of wait and no feedback from the developer [..]

As I already said above, I did already say a while ago that the native iPhone client will be released when it is ready to be released and that, until then, there will be NO status updates, NO preview screenshots and NO public time table. To me it seems a bit unfair to be criticized for not providing status updates when I explicitly said I won't.

> The lack of context-aware mapping switching is painful in real life.

This is incorrect. Remote Buddy *does* have context-aware mapping switching ever since its very first release. And it's enabled by default. You appear to have chosen to turn it off in the preferences. It would have been easy to point that out (and tell you how to solve it), had you contacted the support desk. And, should there be any other configuration issues leading to problems, analyzing and walking through them with you.

Best regards,
Felix Schwarz

I agree with Miguel in being frustrated that the iPhone native remote app, which the developer announced was under development *years ago*, still hasn't been released. And despite what the developer stays, an AJAX/HTML5 remote is no match for a native Cocoa app.

After several years of excuses, Felix (the developer) declared in his October 2011 blog that he has simply given up on a native iOS remote app! What an anticlimactic ending to this saga.

@ Odysseus:

Clearly, there is a difference between

a) "simply giving up" (which is what you claim I did)

- and -

b) spending years of your life to tackle a problem, taking every effort that could realistically have been taken, while continuously keeping on working on incremental and major improvements on the release version, in the end having to realize and publicly explain that the problem can't be solved - and creating a free app to tackle remaining challenges like wake-on-LAN that can't be realized in a web app.

(which is what I did)

But never mind.

Felix,

It took years for you to reach the conclusion that your project was impossible, and during that time you refused to make any further announcements. As for "giving up," I stand by that assessment, since it means, among other definitions, "to abandon what one is doing or planning to do."

Take heart, Felix; very risky to put a highly configurable tool in the hands of folks who would be out-of-their-depth with an Etch-A-Sketch. (Beyond that, I have to wonder what family life is like for relatives of those accustomed to getting their way with rude rants...)