Introducing the all new XKCD app for Boxee. With the Boxee remote in hand you can now sit on your couch and flick through XKCD comics.

In this first version you can navigate left and right through comics one by one and hit the select key to show the alt text for the comic. Features like, jumping to first/latest comic and random comic are on their way.

The new app came about because the XKCD app from the Great Boxee repository has been broken in the Boxee Box for a while now. There was no information in the logs as to why, it just didn’t load, which left me stuck (btw in 1.5 it just started working again! typical). So I have re-written the app from the ground up as a html5 type app. It’s available now in the Boxee app library (not via Great Boxee’s repositoty). As well as a Boxee app, it’s also available outside of Boxee at http://xkcd.greatboxee.com, allowing a lot more people to reach the app.

This marks the beginning of the end for the Great Boxee repository.  It seems there isn’t much love for them at Boxee and problems in the past have made them unworkable. I will keep it open for the time being for those still on Boxee 0.9.x as the new XKCD app, being a html5 type one, only works in Boxee v1.0 and above. The current app works fine in the 0.9.x clients.

Enjoy and I welcome your feedback.

For more about the technology behind it on my personal blog.

Version 2.0 of the XKCD app brings only one new feature and it’s a great big one. This release brings the xkcd ‘Archive’, the entire back catalogue of over 700 comics, going right back to the 1st one ‘Barrel – Part 1‘. Now you can view every comic that was ever made, on your TV.

Feature Rundown

• Using left and right on your remote/keyboard you can flick through all the comics one by one.
• As there’s over 700 comics, these don’t all get downloaded all at once (you’ll be glad to know). The comics get downloaded in batches of 10, so you’ll notice a small pause, and the working dialog appear, every 10 comics viewed.
• There’s 2 buttons in the top right that allow you to skip to the very 1st or very latest comic.
• It’s in beta for now as there’s a few kinks and improvements required.

Now the bad news, for those of you that already have the xkcd app. There’s a bug in Boxee that means that this update wont appear for you automatically. The good-ish news, is there’s a workaround. If you already have the app in ‘My Apps’ in Boxee, remove it from ‘My Apps’ and then re-add it. For anyone that is new to the xkcd app, you’ll just get this version 2.0 of app. Please give your support and vote up the bug to get it fixed. Thanks.

To get XKCD in Boxee add our repository http://dir.greatboxee.com in repositories under Apps.

XKCD is an award winning webcomic from Randall Munroe, a former contractor for NASA. The comics feature stick figures and subject varies widely but the tagline pretty much says it all “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language”.

What’s Coming Next For XKCD

• I’d like to get it to use the player so people can recommend and rate the comics but I gave up in the end it, couldn’t get it to work. Although I think it looks quite neat without.
• I might have to do some work with scrolling if the comic height is quite large. I’ll see how they are as they turn up.

Want anything else? Leave some comments. Ta.

To get XKCD in Boxee add our repository http://dir.greatboxee.com in the App Box.