Building Your First App - A Gonzee Series

**RobSpectre** · October 28th, 2009, 01:35 PM

When getting started with app development, I'm sure everyone has logged a lot of hours with the helpful guide currently on the Boxee developers site. But for a developer new to Python, or even programming in general, it's brevity can be a bit intimidated with a lot of the key steps and concepts left unexplained.

Last month, jendabom and I took a stab at making a new, more comprehensive guide intended for readers completely new to developing on Boxee. This multi-part series will be running on my Boxee Dev blog detailing every step to take a Boxee-spec RSS feed and create a rich, fully skinned Boxee application.

The first installment - Designing The Skin - is here. Each step will be published every two days, wrapping up in a couple weeks.

I welcome the dev community's feedback on this extensive guide and, of course, the input of new Boxee devs on its suitability as a new Boxee resource.

Part 1 - Designing Your Skin: http://www.gonzee.tv/?p=165

Part 2 - Breaking Down The Controls: http://www.gonzee.tv/?p=169

Part 3 - Creating The Skeleton: http://www.gonzee.tv/?p=175

Part 4 - Hello World http://www.gonzee.tv/?p=177

Part 5 - Finishing The Graphics http://www.gonzee.tv/?p=186

Part 6 - The List Container http://www.gonzee.tv/?p=188

Part 7 - The Metadata Box http://www.gonzee.tv/?p=200

Part 8 - Animation http://www.gonzee.tv/?p=212

Part 9 - Release It! http://www.gonzee.tv/?p=216

**RobSpectre** · November 1st, 2009, 11:05 AM

The next installment of this series is now up, giving a quick guide on how to break down the design of your interface into the individual controls of your app.

It's on gonzee.tv here - http://www.gonzee.tv/?p=169

**marcel** · November 2nd, 2009, 04:28 AM

sticky-ed this thread ...thanks

**xmcnuggetx** · November 2nd, 2009, 08:33 AM

love the effort going into this.. should help out people needing to get started!

**RobSpectre** · November 2nd, 2009, 11:03 AM

Awesome, thanks for the feedback guys.

**RobSpectre** · November 2nd, 2009, 11:05 AM

Part 3 of the series is now up where we finally get to the fun stuff. In this part, we take the design we broke down and create the skeleton of our application.

http://www.gonzee.tv/?p=175

**jendabom** · November 2nd, 2009, 11:51 AM

Awesome that you are putting this together Rob. Glad I could help in a small way

**DPK** · January 19th, 2010, 06:26 PM

The original post has now been transcribed here:
http://boxee.zendesk.com/forums/49598/entries/101286

**RobSpectre** · January 27th, 2010, 04:47 PM

Thanks for the feedback folks.

This afternoon I went ahead and edited the guide to reflect the new app handling of the Boxee Beta. Also fixed a couple nagging typos that were hanging up some users.

As always, keep the notes (and the apps!) coming.