Plex is my favourite media server application, and it is now available on all my favourite mobile platforms. The app was initially conceived as an OS X media center a la XBMC but has evolved over time to include iOS, Android and Windows as part of its ecosystem.
The company recently launched myPlex to get around the often-vexing scenario of having to forward ports through a router and fidget with tons of settings. In the era of iCloud, myPlex was essential to the future of Plex.
The service supports high-definition streaming of music, video, photos hosted on your home computer, in addition to built-in Channels like TED, CNN and Netflix. The company has gone ahead and expanded its mobile offering now with a Windows Phone app.
With a Metro-inspired interface, and full myPlex support, you can watch, listen and view on your phone or use the client as a remote control for your desktop. Either way, you have the same functionality as you would on iOS or Android.
The developer had a lot of great things to say about Windows Phone development in a blog post written in conjunction with the app’s release.
So how is the Windows Phone development environment? It’s scary good. C# is a great language, .NET is a solid framework, XAML is a really nice way to design user interfaces, and the edit-build-deploy cycle is fast. It still has a bit of growing up to do, but the proof, as they say, is in the pudding: we were able to write the app from start to finish in two months, between two engineers working part time, which is almost an order of magnitude faster than it took for the iOS and Android app. This sounds impossible, but trust me, it’s incredibly productive. (And as the last one out of the gate, it *needs* to be productive if the platform is to gain the apps it needs.)
He also goes on to say that “Windows Phone [has] got all the ingredients it needs to be successful: It’s a fun, useful, well-designed platform, with sexy (Nokia) hardware, and it’s as good for developers as it is for users. It deserves much more marketshare than it has, and Microsoft seems to be making most of the right moves (about time). We’ll see how it all works out.”
Read the full post over at Plex, and download Plex for Windows Phone for $4.99 from the Marketplace. The trial version is fully-functional but offers only 30-seconds of playback per item.
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