pippin;413063 Wrote: > Probably I should be more specific. > I don't use IRBlaster myself, so I have little experience with this, > but from what I can see, can't you only use volume and power with > IRBlaster? > Or can you configure other commands as well? > And another issue: If you use that approach, the states sent by > IRBlaster have to match the player's states (volume and on/off) so you > can't really control something else without manipulating the player as > well. > Anything else will require either a new hardware - and here I don't see > a big difference to Airremote et al - OR you need a plugin that offers a > separate control layer from the physical player's. The latter is what I > proposed. > > iPeng itself can only communicate to the server, after all the > iPod/iPhone doesn't have IR and you can't talk to the player directly, > so a suitable plugin to communicate to is needed. > And when that is done, we can clearly talk UI. I disagree that you can > have a generic approach for all UI tasks, after all, you will see that > most stuff providing good UIs will have a good portion of this stuff > custom coded for specific use cases, look at Airremote or IRedtoch and > you see what I mean. So the way to go is to define what we want to do > and then we can see how it can be implemented in a generic way so that > different plugins that support the use case can support this, but > supporting something through a generic UI without looking at the use > case will only result in yet another menu.
I don't use IRBlaster either but looking at the plugin code I only see it dealing with the power changes of the squeezebox and volume changes. Note that it can only use SB2/3 because it depends on the earphone jack to be there so it can send signals to that output, which will be converted to IR signals by another device. Because its IR it has no understanding of the state of the devices it controls so it pretty much has to start with a clean slate and begin at a power off state. Most of the code is dealing with the differences of IR codes for devices and converting SC API's etc into IR codes. In my own plugin I was able to bypass much of this because I am dealing only with one companies devices (networked Denon AVP/AVR's). Since I am using the network protocol and not IR I can not only detect the state of the device, but I can have the device tell the SB what to do (for example if you change the volume on the AMP I tell the SB display to change accordingly). You cannot do that with IR because its one way only. I noticed that the two apps mentioned above where still in beta or test (more than a year). They are trying to be like a Harmony but using the iTouch interface. Both of them need some sort of networked box to convert network commands into IR commands. Because they are trying to be universal its very hard to do. This gets back to the basic question. If you really want to make everything simple (and this is my favorite thing about iPeng as Pippin knows) you want to only have it present you with what you need to play your music. To me thats finding the right music, setting up the correct player, turning on the appropriate amplifier (non Boom devices) and making adjustments to those components as I need (ie volumn/pausing). And lastly shutting everything down when I am done. With iPeng today and using either my plugin (special case) or IRBlaster (more general case) I think this is achievable. iPeng does what it does best, and these plugins deal with all the infrastructure underneath. Plus both solutions work with and without iPeng in case you pick up another remote. Asking iPeng to be a universal remote is going to make it ugly in my opinion and I hope if Pippin goes that route he will always make an iPeng lite as well as a full featured one for those that want it to do more. So are there other things that iPeng could do to make the use of SC more enjoyable? Sure. We all wait anxiously for those features. But I don't think making it a universal remote is such a feature. -- Aesculus Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Aesculus's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=14876 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=55514 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
