Please note this right now is for the nominations only, as later, once all final nominees been decided then everyone will be able to vote for the OSD (Open Source Development) projects of their choice in each category. This year Team-XBMC hope that you will help us be nominated in at least the “Best Project for Multimedia” category, and maybe even the “Best Project” category as well, (as it is possible to nominate XBMC Media Center to more than one category). The prize if would win: ‘bragging rights’ and the SourceForge.net CCA logo on our SourceForge.net project page for XBMC Media Center.

Reminder! Last year we were nominated however as the majority of our fans seem to forget that they also needed to vote later again as well, thus we only won the “best project for gamers” category, (and not the prestigious “Best Project for Multimedia” category that we really wanted), even though we were a finalist in 6 categories, (much more than any other project), including the “Best Project for Multimedia” category.

Have YOU nominated the XBMC Media Center project yet?

However where this website is still really lagging behind is the numbers of FanArt backdrops for Games, …now this might not be so important to most of you XBMC users today, but as development have now begun on a Games Library feature for XBMC the time hopefully will sooner rather than later come when you will definitely want XBMC to automatically scrape (download) FanArt backdrops for your favorite games, and as of right now there is no known site other than htbackdrops.com which offer FanArt backdrops for games, as so far not many people have contributed to this community driven site, thus if we all begin contributing to it now then this site will be primed and ready when this feature finally arrives to XBMC.

So please consider uploading your own FanArt (wallpaper backdrops) of your favorite game or musician. Simply register an account on htbackdrops.com and login, you will then find an “Upload” link in the upper right hand corner for the category you are in.

Now you to can become a fan of XBMC on Facebook, post fan photos and videos or post a review, and tell all your friends of the best free and cross-port media center software available: http://www.facebook.com/XBMC

Are you a fan of XBMC?

PortableApps.com works similar to U3, the main difference is that PortableApps.com is free and open source , and it also works with any with any portable USB Mass Storage Device for Windows (USB flash drive, iPod, portable harddrive, etc) . Checkout the wikipedia article about it.

The storage device would not be bootable but it would be very cool to do a quick demo of XBMC on any of your friend’s Microsoft Windows computer with it, simply plug-in the USB storage device in any Windows XP or Vista computer and XBMC is ready to be used.

Discussion about this can be found in the XBMC Community Forum.

For more information please see these threads in the XBMC forum here, here, here, and here.

Are there any C++ programmers out there who owns a PPC Mac yourselves and might be interested in this?

Team-XBMC plan is try to put together two stable released each year which will first get a codename and then later a number version once it makes ‘Gold’. One release will be made in April each year and another release in October each year.

We will also be using codenames for each planned release up until the ‘Gold’ (general availablity release)’ of that version has been released. The codename is not just a bit of fun but actually serves a practical purpose when using Ubuntu’s Year.Month versioning, as the codename is used during the Alpha, Beta, and Release Candidate development stages instead of a number to reference that version just in case we would to miss planned release month, (releasing version called 8.10 in November of 2008 would not make since when using Ubuntu’s Year.Month versioning as described above, that version would then be called 8.11 instead as November is the 11th month of the year).

The code name for the upcoming release is Atlantis. We made the decision to pick codenames that reference locations in popular TV-series to have the codenames be media related, (Atlantis for example reference “Stargate Atlantis“). Will be choosing the codenames alphabetically, so this upcoming release codename as you can now read starts with the letter “A”, and the codename for the next release which is scheduled to be released in April 2009 will begin with the letter “B”, (and if we manage to get the ‘Gold’ versions of that out in April 2009 then it will carry the version 9.04 with again the “9″ part standing for 2009 and the “04″ part standing for the 4th month of the year which is April). As such in October of 2009 we plan to release version 9.10 of XBMC with it until then having a codename that begins with the letter “C”, and in April of 2010 the plan is to release version 10.04 of XBMC with it until then having a codename that begins with the letter “D”, and so on and so on…

Examples of possible codenames:
- Fox River (as in Fox River State Penitentiary from Prison Break)
- Primatech (as in Primatech Paper Co. from Heroes)
- Orchid (a Dharma station in Lost)

Obviously these are just examples of possible codenames, no names after Atlantis have yet been picked.

For more information about software release life cycle please please read this this wikipedia article.