Clicker Bounty

I posted a blog entry about getting Clicker ported to Linux and GNOME. I have had many questions about it, and wanted to be sure people understand the goals.

The Bounty

If you have a Mac, you probably already know about Salling Clicker. A great application to control your computer from your Bluetooth mobile phone (unfortunately not mine, Clicker crashes on startup on the V547) or your Palm. I will give away £150 to the person who:

  • reverse-engineers the Bluetooth protocol used by Clicker, and documents it
  • implements a BlueZ-based library to use this protocol (better if it's a GObject-based one)...
  • ...as well as a Rhythmbox plugin.

It should at the minimum work with a Nokia or Sony-Ericsson phone, and a Palm device, and be able to display cover art, and control Rhythmbox playback (a proof-of-concept plugin is fine).

Reasoning

The hardware support

Clicker supports hundreds of devices and requires a client to be running on many of them. Having to write support for all those would require a lot of work. Many of the existing Bluetooth remote control programs for Linux only work with a small number of clients, using Clicker would alleviate that.

The existing user-base

There's already a user-base for the Windows and Mac ports. Having native Linux support would mean being able to use the same devices under Linux, MacOS X and Windows.

What about Clicker's bottom-line

We don't want to hurt Clicker, and would have to discuss with them what would happen to their software if the protocol specs were freely available. We wouldn't want Clicker to go away, as it would mean having to work on all the clients (probably new ones as well).

* Toothmote, a remote control tool similar to bluemote (both only Sony Ericsson)

* GBTcr (only Sony Ericsson, might be a good start for a Clicker-like UI though)

* xkbd-bthid, a keyboard emulator

* Bemused (only works on Symbian phones, the PalmOS port is 404, and it looks outdated)

Attic/ClickerBounty (last edited 2013-12-03 14:38:35 by WilliamJonMcCann)