First of all, the winner of the pet monkey from the last post is Dean M, who was the first to name the movie. Very nicely done, sir.
So there is this tab on the iOS application that has been blacked out (or “red-ed out” to be more precise about it) in previous posts.
Unfortunately, in a true comedy of errors, I did a horrible job of keeping it a secret. In the first post, I left some images on the server that didn’t have the button blocked out, and one clever person found it by typing in URLs. He was kind enough to send me an email about it to let me know, and I removed the images (thanks, Charles!).
Last night I was so tired when writing the blog post that I left the button completely unobscured in not one but TWO separate images. Twenty two comments poured in mentioning this fact (which I left unapproved, of course).
So just in case there’s anybody out there who doesn’t yet know, the feature which we’ve been trying to keep secret is this:
Yep, that’s it. Search. It’s a really boring feature, actually, we have been trying to replace it with something much cooler over the last few days, but we ran out of time.
Or did we?
This is not your grandmother’s search. This is an ass-kicking, search-as-you-type, tri-winning sort of a search. Forget tiger blood, this is pure 100% velociraptor blood.
So where are these results coming from? Well, it searches the Plex Media Server you’re connected to, obviously. But we went a step further, and made it search all Plex Media Servers in your house. And really, why stop there? We also made it return results from online sites as well. Through the magic of our friends at VideoSurf, it returns results from YouTube and Vimeo.
The search functionality is extremely pluggable, so you’ll see new providers come online very shortly, as well as the ability to add your own custom providers, should you so choose.
But really, why stop at the mobile apps? Why not extend the feature to the desktop client as well? Excellent question.
So there you have it. Plex now has a rich (and fun!) universal search feature, which searches all the local media in your house, and online media, in one unified interface. You can search from either your mobile device, or the comfort of your couch.
Pretty cool, right?