Announcing Centrafuse Market and the 3.5 SDK incl. Centrafuse Studio Beta 1

[Reagan]

Centrafuse Market – An app store for your car!
At last, an easy and convenient way to browse, search, install, and manage all of your Centrafuse plugin apps directly from your driver’s seat. Introducing the Centrafuse Market – an app store for your car! By using the Centrafuse Market plugin, you can browse the market from the road (requires internet connection) or at home from your web browser *Online app directory coming soon.

Your Centrafuse, Your Apps
Now you can install ONLY the apps you want, and NONE of the ones you don't! This makes for a leaner & lighter core, quicker load times and higher performance. All this, plus increased customization – that’s what we call a win-win-win. You can browse the available apps by category, most downloaded, highest rated or by simply searching. Start customizing Centrafuse the way you want it, today!

Simplified App Delivery
Centrafuse Market streamlines and standardizes how plugin apps are created, deployed and updated. This means as a developer, you can quickly and easily push updates out to your users, avoiding the hassle of relying on detailed instructions, minimizing end-user install issues. As an end-user this means less time fiddling with complex installation instructions, and more time checking out new apps!

Painless App Updates
Updating apps is also a breeze; it works much like your smartphone. The developer uploads a new version and the Market takes care of the rest. Just check the My Apps button, at the bottom of the Market App, to see if there are any updates available. Updating an app won’t even need to restart Centrafuse in most cases.

Market Phase 2 - Payments
Beginning next quarter, we will begin to roll-out phase 2 of our Market program so you can start selling your apps! Also, keep an eye out for our Centrafuse Certification Program, which will officially verify you and your apps as compatible and up-to-date with our Centrafuse Framework.

Check out a short video overview of the Market:

click here to watch the video

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Accessing the Centrafuse Market

Attention Developers
In order to submit your plugin apps to the Market you will need to sign up as a developer on your My Account page. Once you complete the sign up form, you will have access to download the new 3.5 SDK from your main account page.

The SDK includes three PDF documents you must read. One PDF explains the CFAPP package specification and how to create a Market-compatible application package. Be sure and read the documentation and learn how to strong name your plugin and properly create the cfapp.xml file.

You should test your CFAPP package before submitting to the Market by making a copy of it first and double-clicking it. You may also copy it to a USB thumb drive and insert it into a PC running Centrafuse 3.5 and you will be prompted to install any app package found. When your CFAPP package is ready, submit it to the Market for approval. Your app may take a few days to be approved, because we have to test and approve it first.

IMPORTANT: Also, you MUST NOT use Windows ZIP, but WinRAR to create the ZIP file. Others such as WinZIP and 7ZIP may work, but have not been tested as of yet.

IMPORTANT: Be sure and make a copy or you WILL lose your CFAPP package file because after Centrafuse installs the package it is deleted.

Attention End-Users
Access to the Centrafuse Market is included in the latest Centrafuse Auto 3.5 available from your account page, or the Trial Downloads page. You can view the Market content by first entering your My Account username and password into the Market plugin’s Settings screen. If you get an invalid username password error, and you’re sure you typed it correctly, just restart Centrafuse.

Then start up the Market plugin and start checking out some apps.
You should start to see some 3rd party community apps appear as early as Sunday afternoon. By the end of next week, there should be quite a few community apps available. There are already a few developers working on readying their plugin apps now.

Don’t have internet in your car yet? We understand. For offline users, you will be able to download CFAPP packages directly from the Centrafuse website, place them on a USB thumb drive, and install them easily in your car right in Centrafuse! This is coming very soon and will be announced.

Centrafuse 3.5 SDK now with Centrafuse Studio
We are very excited to announce the latest Centrafuse SDK featuring a ton of new API additions, code examples, IDE templates, graphics and other SDK goodies. Making its worldwide debut with the 3.5 SDK release – please meet our newest creation, Centrafuse Studio!

How to get the new SDK
To download the latest 3.5 SDK simply go to your account page and signup as a Market developer. You must have a My Account login to sign up. If you don’t have an account you can create one. – Login here.

Centrafuse Studio Beta 1

1. Completely FREE skinning utility created to help developers customize skins and plugin apps further and more quickly than ever before, while also maintaining ease of use.

2. Open and customize any 3.5 compatible main skin or plugin application skin.

3. Create, re-size and modify any element or control within Centrafuse without knowing ANY CML!

4. Reduce human error by eliminating the need to manually edit the CML markup.

5. Still prefer to work with CML directly? You can easily switch between Design and CML mode directly from Centrafuse Studio.

6. Easy drag-and-drop image importing system.

7. Easy drag-and-drop controls onto skin sections or plugin applications.

8. Easily edit any properties of a control, font, and more! No more remembering all the options and fields for a specific control.

9. View alternative language translations on the fly.

10. Preview dynamic and simple button actions and text without launching Centrafuse.

This is the initial Centrafuse Studio Beta 1; there will be much more to come!

Be sure to check out the YouTube video below to see a brief tutorial of the features and options of Studio.

Centrafuse Studio Video on YouTube

click here to watch the video

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IMPORTANT: Remember, this is a Beta and there a few known issues which will be published below. We encourage you to submit a Support Ticket from your account page to report bugs and feature requests for Centrafuse Studio.

Centrafuse 3.5 SDK Highlights
There are many new enhancements in the Centrafuse 3.5 SDK. Many performance and compatibility issues were resolved behind the scenes, as well as new examples created to help show the power of the Centrafuse SDK.

IMPORTANT: All plugin applications and modules must be recompiled against the latest cfplugin.dll included in the Centrafuse 3.5 SDK before they will be able to run in Centrafuse 3.5.

For more details please install the Centrafuse 3.5 SDK and refer to the complete documentation that is included in that package. Note: The words “plugin”, “plugin application” and “app” are used interchangeably. They are all the same.

Below is a high level overview of just some of the changes, please refer to the complete documentation for details.

New Visual Studio templates and code examples

• New Advanced Listview example to easily show how to use the new template format directly from CML. This example will help users learn to control the new Advanced Listview and harness the power this highly versatile control.
• The DIPlugin example shows how easy it is to play online media streams in Centrafuse. This is a useful example because it shows how to override the main play controls in the header of Centrafuse, as well as some of the newly added media streaming easy to use SDK methods.

API Features and SDK Additions

• · Ability to play streams directly in Centrafuse and control them.

· CF_playAudioFile
· CF_getAudioFileDuration
· CF_controlAudioFile
· CF_playAudioStream
· CF_controlAudioStream
· CF_getAudioStatus

• · Ability to send commands to the voice recognition engine. This would be used if you had your own custom VR (cfvr.dll) implementation and wanted to have your plugins send commands directly to that module.

· CF_vrCommand

• · Ability for plugins to send events to other plugins. Any plugin can attach to the pluginEvent and receive events. Other plugins can call the raisePluginEvent and it will be broadcast to all plugins/modules that are attached. This can be useful for plugin to plugin communication.

· CF3_raisePluginEvent(e)
· CF_events.pluginEvent

• · Added new methods to the Navigation interface. This can be used and implemented when creating your own Navigation plugins, or can be used against our Destinator implementation.

· CF_navGetPOICategories
· CF_navGetPOISubCategories
· CF_nav_GetPOILocations
· CF_navIsPOICategoryVisible
· CF_navShowPOICategory

• · We added many new CMLActions that are now available to skin developers. These can all easily be seen by using the CMLAction drop down in the Centrafuse Studio Beta 1.

• · Plugins now have the ability to add their own voice commands and easily register and receive events when they are spoken. You would register the command, and use the standard CF_pluginCMLCommand override to receive the necessary notification.

· CF3_createVoiceCommands
· CF_pluginCMLCommand

• · We added the ability for plugins to create and add their own hotkey commands. You would register the new command, and then use the override to receive the necessary notification.

· CF_loadHotkey
· CF_pluginCMLCommand

• · New Visual Studio templates were created that work with both VS2008 and VS2010. Simply open Visual Studio and select File/New->Project. This will bring up your Installed Templates, click on C#, and then Centrafuse. We added Bluetooth, NavPlugin, Radio, Voice, Mixer, Plugin, and TTS.

• · Added new voice recording methods to the SDK, these can easily be used if you want to record input from a microphone or device and store them as a file on the system.

· CF_params.recordDevice
· CF_params.recordLine
· CF_startRecordVoice

• · Added CFApplication class to inherit from, examples will come in a future SDK. This can be used to create standalone executables that still use CML and the Centrafuse skin engine.

• · Video of standalone executable using Centrafuse to create a cluster:
  
  click here to watch the video

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• · A new GestureArea control has been added; this can be used to add gesture support over the entire application, or used to create small gesture areas. You would specify the CMLAction and your plugin can receive this notification with CF_pluginCMLCommand when the gesture is complete.

• · A Gauge control has been added and support basic options such as needlewidth, needletype, needleradius, needlecolor1, needlecolor2, arcstart, sweep, max, and

· CF_setGauge

• · Advanced listview templates have been moved from being in a separate file and into the CML directly. Please refer to the Advanced Listview example in the latest SDK for reference.

• · The effects profiles have been moved directly in the main “skin.xml” file, refer to the “Clean” “skin.xml” file for reference.

There are other additions to the SDK, please download the complete Centrafuse 3.5 SDK from your account page and read through the documentation.

Thank you for sharing this momentous occasion with us. This is a huge step for the Centrafuse community the official kick-off of the Centrafuse Market.

Enjoy! We can’t wait to see some great new apps on the Market!

Thanks,

Reagan and the Centrafuse Team