Hi Gang, We will not be accepting submissions to the Plugin Market between December 7 and December 31. We will begin accepting submissions again on Jan 1, 2013. Three weeks. Details: We opened the Plugin Market about 90 days ago in an effort to help folks create better apps, help developers show off their talents (and earn some money), and help push the buzztouch approach to the next level. We've done all of this. However, we hoped to learn some things about the process along the way so we could make improvements, and learn we did! The single biggest challenge so far has been managing the submissions and getting them approved or rejected. This is especially true for plugins that are submitted in a half-baked, undone, broken state. These submissions didn't surprise us - we've welcomed everyones ideas and offered to help complete each new screen type from the beginning so that we could get the market rolling in the right direction. Fixing, coding, and changing plugins for developers to get them in the market was expected and totally OK. And, we did get a few dozens things released (that we didn't have before) because we didn't force developers to only submit 100% completed ideas. We knew we would have our work cut-out for us when this started and have figured out some improvements that MUST to be made. So, we are taking the remaining part of December to "get caught up" and to "re tool" the process so we can release more plugins, faster, with higher quality when we begin re-taking submissions on Jan 1 2013. If you're a developer, and you were nearing the submission phase, you have two choices. You can go ahead and submit what you have (before Dec. 7) or you can wait until Jan 1. In either case we'll do our best to get your idea working and available in the market. Super stoked with some of the ideas we've been working on and CAN'T WAIT until Jan 1 to surprise everyone :-)

Awesome:)

Awesome!! I'm sure the new year will bring great things. One question, I have been developing a free plugin during the past days. Is it ok to offer it to the community by downloading off of my site just in case I don't make the deadline? Thanks!

Super!! Great news! Can't wait to see what 2013 will bring us. Best Regards, Danny

@mysps: Absolutely. Get that thing on your site, post a link, watch em' smile.

rush rush. I've got 3 close to completion

Will this mean bug fixes to existing plugin-ins will be similarly affected? (I haven't written a plug-in, but I'm hoping for a bug-fix to one specific one)

Happy days to 2013! Nearly there now.

@AlanMac: What bug-fix are you waiting on? Bug fixes are an ongoing thing and do get attention outside the existing Plugin submission process. If something isn't working as expected we'll need to get it figured out and fixed. Post the URL (in this thread) to the discussion thread about the issue. I'm assuming this exists. LOL. It's better that we use the other conversation to address that issue instead of adding to this one.

https://www.buzztouch.com/forum/thread.php?tid=A4EA915EEED0FD29EC96FDB jump to the end, I think this one just slipped under the radar....

As a new guy around here I did notice that the limited numbers of Plugins was going to make my life a little harder so this sounds like a good plan. Ultimately, the plugins are what will make BT successful. What is here works great however and I can't wait to see the plug ins starting flooding the gates!

Sounds exciting, can't wait.... I'm trying to figure out if you want folks to submit new stuff now or would rather people wait? I like that you're not slamming the door, but if the room is getting too full....? I've got a couple that are pretty much fully functional - but as you know they can always use more testing!

What happens if the world ends on the 21st? Then we won't get our plugin market! Hehe I am a complete believer that this will NOT happen.

^ LOL. This probably won't make as much sense to UK folks. But NBA fans might get a kick out of this great Myan 2012 mock- http://www.oldspicesavestheworld.com/ (gotta love those killer 8bit graphics!)

@ATRAIN53 - You're right, it didn't!

Dear Santa I would like an RSS Reader plugin for Christmas please. Thank you Miche (I've been on the good list all year)

@David...I have a working code for that idea I had emailed you a while back but would definitely need your help in looking at it for making it ready for the plugin market. Let me know when you have a chance to chat about it ;)

Awe man... I've been trying to do an update to my iAP plugin for about a month now (absolutely no time with college work especially now with finals), this will go for updates as well I presume?

David, I have nearly 20 posts so I must be qualified to give advice :) It seems it would make sense from the BT side as well as the developer side to have an organized way that people could voice needs for plugins. So if many people needed say a streaming radio plugin for android and iOS (shameless) then a developer would fill the need. It would help the developers spend time on projects that could make them money and it would get more apps coming out of BT. Maybe you have thought of this...

@Stephenlay: Absolutely. It also makes sense that we could all see a list of plugins that other developers were currently working on to help prevent double-work. In time :-)

Yes that is a really good idea too!

Plugin wars!

@miche: RSS is something that folks have talked about, tinkered with (remember the old days of BT?) and experimented with tons of times. I think the reasons you haven't seen one yet is that RSS tends to cause all sorts of trouble in terms of the "format" and "style" and "layout" and "what happens when you tap a story" title type questions. RSS for you may have a totally different meaning than RSS for somebody else. There are three fundamental challenges with this: 1) Loading story titles: Getting a screen to recognize literally dozens of different types of "RSS" formats that all different types of backends, websites, and feeds provide is tough. In the old days, RSS was a standard. Today, it's all over the place. RSS from Feedburner is different than RSS From WordPress is different than RSS from New York Times is different than RSS from BBC, etc, etc. There are similarities but differences too. Displaying this data in a browser is trivial, like Google or Safari or Firefox. Parsing each individual data point to then show in a native list is entirely different. It's tough unless you know exactly what data points are available in the feed - in advance. 2) HTML: Tons of RSS feeds provide HTML directly in the data points these days. Again, think browser. The trouble with HTML is that it's not generally built for mobile but instead for a full size browser. Not always, but usually. Loading a giant HTML blob is entirely different than parsing a list of stories to show in a native list or screen. 3) What happens when you tap a story title? If you're looking to load the story in a simple web view, like the full sized webpage you'll almost always run into a lame experience because again, the story loads entirely with the websites header, footer, ads, videos, etc, etc. Generally looks crappy in mobile. And, why not just use safari anyway if you're going to load normal webpages? Apple frowns on apps that simply show the same thing that a user could get using mobile safari - as they should. Knowing that may help explain why we don't see an RSS plugin yet. But, for sure there is a place for RSS and for sure there must be a creative way to show RSS story titles and story content in a compelling, mobile, fast way. I think we'll see it eventually :-)

To paraphrase what David is saying: The developer that overcomes the RSS difficulties and handles the titles and content compellingly would have a very successful and money making plug in. Multi platform please :)

Is this any good for ideas for the BT plugin developers here? http://netnewswireapp.com/iphone

Or maybe https://blogs.oracle.com/mobile/entry/oracle_brings_java_to_ios and http://www.rssowl.org/

^ nice link on that Oracle. They mentioned that at Oracle Day I attened the other day but didn't provide any more info. Thanks for the link. >> To paraphrase what David is saying: The developer that overcomes the RSS difficulties and handles the titles and content compellingly would have a very successful and money making plug in. Multi platform please :) Cool! I have been tinkering around with an XML Parser. It's somewhat operational but there's no way I can see a single plug-in that would work for both platforms. NSXML Parser and SAX Parser and very different. For iOS you have to create your own class and for sure you need to know what elements are in play. How to connect and utilize dynamic 'elements' using JSON in the CP is a pretty big task. Making this work without the CP and modifying the source code is a lot easier than making an RSS reader that is totally configured in the BT Control Panel. Connecting these plug-ins to the CP is no trivial task, I think this is the biggest bottleneck of of plug-in dev. Getting better the more I do it but it's a multi-step process and lots of trial and error still. And almost all of the RSS readers I see for IOS are sans the image element, which is something I know people want. Some feeds force you to extract it. I think the reality is specific RSS feed plug-ins designed to work with a particular site - and a developer that needs to be ready to modify the code if that feed changes....(because it will!)

I think I know some of what needs to be done to provide a good RSS solution and some of the how. It would come in at least two parts. The first part is to be able to have an RSS Reader plug-in. The problem is that the RSS reader usually clicks through to a story on a server outside your control, with formatting you cannot control. The second part, that addresses the compatibility and story formatting issues, is to have a matching RSS server side solution. This could be based around a blog tool, I've managed to do this with a Wordpress blog and an RSS reader before and deliver an smartphone acceptable solution, but I didn't know how to populate the blog from remote sources, so I did not progress with it. The hard part here is if you want content that you are not creating. There may be a way of copying or linking content from someby elses site, there would be technical and copyright issues to overcome. If anyone can suggest a solution for scraping source content from other sites (if they are happy to let you) that, we might have a way forward...

I hijacked David's thread -sorry. P.S. ATRAIN53, while it is elegant to have one multi-platform plugin, it is really not a requirement. With my project, as an example, we will have a streaming radio part and and RSS app for archives. It needs to look and provide the same functionality (roughly) for iOS and Android but as long as the plugins look and feel the same it does not matter. Bonus, now you have two plugins to sell :)

2 days before the Plugin Market accepts submissions again! Can't wait, bring up the goodies!!!! :)

cant wait to see the new goodies