Chris, just to relief you, I don't see iPeng as being as a universal "do-anything" remote, yet I do want to finally be able to control all music related commands with it, that's why I will add things like a power button for a server and a way to switch to the digital inputs on Transporter from the player interface. The trick is to bury these features in a way they don't clutter up anything in the "plain" interface while still being somewhat simple to reach. The way is to have items easily or less easily accessible based on the frequency of use.
I also have been asking for a use-case description because I somewhat lack an understanding on what a more general approach is good for. I definitely do NOT understand what Airremote et al are good for if they use IR as a channel, and this is also why I am always pretty critical about "Multimedia". My experience is that different Media have very different requirements and that mixing those into one system will simply give you a bad system. I'm having a bad time with this approach here in Germany because right now everybody is so obsessed with "convergence" and video. I'll give you an example: I believe an iPod touch is a VERY good remote for playing music (obviously) because you can access your database, you can manipulate players and playlists and generally you are flexible to show a lot of information and have a flexible use case. Plus - and that's the most important point for me - you can carry it around because I tend to listen to music everywhere: Kitchen, bathroom, sofa, bed... It has one drawback, and that is lack of immediate access because you have to disable the screen saver first. For TV or video, IMHO, the situation is very different. I don't carry my TV around a lot and it does have a big screen to give me all the visual feedback I want. So for a TV, I believe an infrared device is the better solution. I also don't have the problem that it ends up being in another room, since I only use it in a line-of-sight area from the TV screen. So as much as I (would) hate having 25 remotes around, I believe merging these two use cases will result in unnecessary compromises on at least one side and that while even adding additional cost - given the price of simple IR remotes. Just my 2cts :-) -- pippin --- see iPeng, the Squeezebox iPhone remote, at penguinlovesmusic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 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
