Welcome, JimC. Your irreverence should serve you well in this eclectic community.
I am one of the oddball contributors to the Slimserver code--in my case, that is largely restricted to the Nokia770 and Touch skins. As such, I've spent a lot of time on the forums and even longer on the code itself, so I have some opinions. They are not organized. They go like this: 1. Don't drink the Windows-only kool-aid. One of the great things about slimserver is it's cross-platform support. I imagine a great deal of Logitech products have listed on their box "Requirements: Windows 2000/XP/Vista". If I ever see that happen to slimserver I'll bail quick as can be, along with a lot of the other pro-bono contributors to the software. 2. Stick a knob on the Squeezebox, a la Transporter. If you do a search of my posts on this forum the word "knob" comes up several dozen times, and not because I am one. 3. The web interface is much maligned, but there is potential for a great deal of usability improvements that would really stimulate customer satisfaction. I tried to introduce the kind of responsiveness the UI needs with AJAX in the Nokia770 and Touch skins. While I puff up with pride at the positive reviews users have given me, I really believe that what I've done is only a proof-of-concept, and there's a huge amount to be done in this area. UI should be quick, intuitive, and beautiful. Web browsers are notoriously poor in these areas, but it's the closest thing we have to a fully cross-OS GUI development platform, and with AJAX things can be much better. What will such an effort require? IMO, head count. I built Nokia770 on my own time, much like lots of stuff available for slimserver, but Logitech can't expect all good things to happen via the community. Invest in one or a couple of good front-end web programmers and reap the benefits of it down the line. My big hope on the Logitech transition is that they will backup their acquisition with the resources (i.e., $$) a large corporation can offer. 4. One word (or is it three?): Squeezeboombox. 5. Harmony remotes, which I have yet to try, people seem to think are the bee's knees. A Harmony with native slimserver support, including 2-way communication, would be a huge win. If you build it, they will buy. I'd write more, but it's happy hour in Minnesota. Cheers and good luck, #!/ben -- bklaas "the Nokia770 skin guy" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bklaas's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=58 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31324 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
