For years, developer Doug Berrett has been toiling away at an application that really should have been developed by Microsoft. WebGuide provides a slew of ways to interact with your Windows Media Center PC on the go, whether you want to remotely schedule recordings or stream recorded TV shows.

Well, it looks like Microsoft noticed Berrett's work, and the company went and hired him. While this is great news for Berrett, it's also good news for you. Because it means that WebGuide is now available as a free download. No more $18 fee to register your software.

Berrett will be working with the Media Center team to push Media Center "into the high-end custom installation market," which means he won't be offering updates to WebGuide anymore. But he did push out one final release yesterday. Updates for Windows Vista and Windows XP MCE 2005 editions include:

• Updated "now playing" screen to not update the progress bar as often in full screen mode
• Fixed login text entry on Xbox 360
• Added auto-redirect to mobile pages for mobile devices

Congratations Doug!

[via Missing Remote]

Remember that little web interface for Media Portal we told you about the other day? Yeah, turns out it was largely ripped off from Doug Berrett's WebGuide4 for Windows Media Center.

Chris Lanier noticed how similar the graphics were on the two products, and after a little snooping, Barrett and others noticed that those similarities seem to extend to the program's code.

Media Portal has posted an apology of sorts, stating that the team borrowed some graphics to use during the testing phase of the project. And then they forgot to remove those graphics before issuing a release. The web guide is no longer available for download.

While it would be nice to see a web interface for Media Portal, there's no real excuse for stealing code. Hopefully the team will be able to remove all the code and issue an update in the future. And hopefully they'll post a more sincere apology to Barrett than "sorry for ripping off your graphics, we meant to clean it up before sending it out to the public. Whoops."

Doug Berrett plans to release an update to Webguide 4.0 for Windows Vista. The program already lets you schedule recordings on your home theater PC from any web connected PC or Windows Mobile PDA. But why bother opening a web browser if you don't have to?

The latest update will show your guide, recorded programs and upcoming recordings in a Vista Sidebar Gadget. You can set it up to show the latest info for the PC its installed on, or you can configure the gadget to work with a remote machine, allowing you to keep track of your recordings while you're slacking off at the office.

[via Ian Dixon]