Google Chromecast

I have a Blu-ray/DVD player from Samsung, and it works fine for playing dvds or blu-ray disks.  Additionally, it has a few apps, like Netflix, to play videos over the internet.  Unfortunately, using this blu-ray player to watch anything on the internet is *not* a good experience.

• It is very hard to search for a movie, because there isn't a keyboard.  You have to use the remote and direction arrows to type in a movie title. 
• Just opening the app for Netflix or Youtube is very slow (much slower than on my computer that uses the same internet connection).  
• You cannot view an arbitrary website.  You can only view videos from a few specific sources.
• For Netflix, there isn't a way to turn on subtitles.  This feature is available on my computer and tablet.

Because of this poor experience, I wanted to buy a cable to connect my laptop to my television.  After a bit of research, I eventually decided to forego wires and go for a Google Chromecast.  So far the experience has been great.  Also, every issue I had with the "Smart" blu-ray player was solved with the Chromecast. 

• Searching for movies is simple, because I use my computer to browse.  
• Opening apps is fast, because I use my computer. 
• As long as you can open a video from a browser, you can "Cast" it to the television.  So, you don't have to wait for a new app to be supported.
• For Netflix, you can turn on subtitles.

Another benefit of using a Google Chromecast is that you can cast movies from any device.  It works from my Macbook Air, my wife's Windows laptop, my Android phone and tablet.

*Update* I have had mixed results watching videos through the browser.  Perhaps the download rate isn't good enough, but sometimes the video is laggy and jumpy.  For apps, the video quality is consistently very good.

*Update* One disadvantage of using Chromecast is that you need some wi-fi infrastructure.  So, if all you have is a movie on a computer without wifi, you wouldn't be able to cast it to a television.  In a more common scenario, if you are in a hotel, the wifi restrictions may prevent you from casting videos, but I haven't verified this.

Into the unknown with Google App Engine

As mentioned before, I am setting up a cloud back-end for my mobile app.

This has involved writing code in a few different languages.  

• Java - for the android application.
• Python - for writing the Google Endpoints API.
• Javascript/Html/Css - for writing a web client for the endpoints API. 

Working from the tutorials, I have been able to progress without too much issue.  However, I ran into a little bit of confusion when trying to pass around a datetime object.  Specifically, I wanted to:

1. Start with a date / time value. 
2. Pass that to my endpoints api. 
3. Store it in the Google App Engine datastore.

I couldn't find solid documentation on how this works, so it took me a while to figure out. Here are the steps:

1. In javascript code pass in your date time for some field like so:
   { some_field : "2011-12-16T10:00:00.000" }
   The format is Year-Month-Date"T"Hour:Minute:Second.FractionalSeconds
   When I tested, passing in a time zone offset threw an error.
2. In python, when you construct your date time field use:
   from protorpc import message_types
   some_field = message_types.DateTimeField(1, required = True)
   # This is a little bit different from passing other fields which use protorpc.messages
3. Once you have the datetime field, you can use the type ndb.DateTimeProperty in your model that you will insert.

This all works by passing in a string, which gets parsed and converted to a datetime object.  If you didn't want to use protorpc conversion to a datetime object, you can pass in a datetime string that you'd have to encode and decode.

Update - After I set up an Android client to send data to my endpoints api, I got more errors about the datetime having a bad timezone format.  After some trial and error then googling for solutions, I decided that dealing with datetime data wasn't worth the hassle.  I changed the datastore to only save "Long" values.  Then I updated the API to send and receive long values.  Finally, when I get to the UI, I convert the long into date time format for display.  This made things much simpler and cleaner.