MCEBrowser had 226 downloads in the first 24 hours. That is awesome! I hope everyone is enjoying it. So far, I noticed that Ian Dixon, Chris Lanier, and Nathan Weinberg all made mention of MCEBrowser today. Awesome. Thanks, guys!

Now that version 1.0 has been released to the general public, I want to talk a little about some of the features I am looking at for the next version.

Nathan Weinberg posted a semi-review of MCEBrowser which hit on some of the key features that are missing in this version. These are some of the things I would like to address in the “.1″ release, listed in order of priority:

1. Mouse/Keyboard Support


This was brought up by several of the beta testers. The Microsoft Remote Keyboard for MCE has become very popular, and it would be nice if MCEBrowser allowed you to use it for browsing. Even though I have invested a considerable amount of time in trying to get this feature to work, I still have a few tricks up my sleeve that I haven’t tried yet. However, I just didn’t have the time to get this feature in version 1.0. Anyone on the Microsoft Internet Explorer team want to help me out with this one??

2. Page Scrolling / Link Navigation


Now that I have received some feedback, I realize that my button choices for page scrolling and link navigation may have been incorrect. I think the reason this thing is slow for link navigation is that the Channel +/- buttons do not repeat very fast. I am thinking about changing the Channel +/- buttons to page up/down in the web page, and the Up/Down arrows to do the link navigation. There are also some optimizations that I can do in the link navigation/DOM parsing code to make it faster.

3. URL Entry


Personally, I think it’s fine to set up you favorites in IE, and just select which one you want to go to inside MCEBrowser. But, I have had requests from several people to add a URL entry page so you can enter what URL you want to go to. Sounds easy, just need to support triple-tap.

4. Form Navigation


Currently, you can only navigate links on a page, but some people have requested to navigate form elements. It would be nice if you could navigate form elements, enter values using triple-tap, and click on form buttons with the remote control. Once keyboard/mouse support is added, this should just be a small step away.

Are there any other features you would like to see in the next release? Post a comment or send me an email (mcebrowser at anpark.com).