TiVo Application Tutorial - Traffic Cam Viewer             

As I created my first application, I decided to document the first part of it to help you, the new TiVo application writer, to get started.  Since a lot of these tutorials assume you already know a lot, I'm going to try not to make that assumption, so I'll link in some 'helper' pages for some of the steps if you're not already the world's most experienced TiVo developer.  We all have to start somewhere -- this tutorial is intended to remove all the intimidation from writing an app, and get you off the ground!

The Tutorial

This tutorial is broken up into small chunks.  Each chunk is an hour or less, so you should be able to do one chunk per day, even if you have no experience.

     Day 1: Installing Eclipse, the Tivo HME, and the Bananas Toolkit
     Day 2: Getting the first screen to show up in the simulator
     Day 3: Real TiVo test; adding menu items
     Day 4: Taking stock; Eclipse tricks
     Day 5: adding real functionality
     Next steps

If you want to print the whole thing out, here's the whole thing strung together, formatted to print.

The Application

Many big cities have a network of traffic cameras for their major highways, and they feed the images from these cameras to web pages.  We're going to write an app that lets you view those images from your TiVo.  We'll start small, by picking a couple cameras from the Portland, OR area, and just rotating through them.  This will be sufficient for the purposes of this tutorial; I am writing a much more extensive version of this application that will support multiple cities, custom camera lists, etc.

Take a sneak peek at what the finished application will do. (Screen video, 11 MB, 55 seconds)

TiVo HME SDK Intro Page

Contact the Author

Send David Staas e-mail at: