> Welcome, JimC. Your irreverence should serve you well in this eclectic > community.
If only it served me well in real life. > I am one of the oddball contributors to the Slimserver code--in my case, > that is largely restricted to the Nokia770 and Touch skins... Thanks! One of the things that I find most intriguing about this opportunity is the community and the third-party developers. > 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. There are no plans that I know of to switch to Windows-only and I certainly won't be pushing for it. > 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. Hehe... he said "knob". > ...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. While I haven't yet used your skins, I understand exactly what you're asking for and I happen to agree with it 100%. I think one of the biggest improvements that can be made to the overall platform is the UI on the PC side. And it does need to be quick, intuitive, and beautiful. (I would insert a comment here to the effect that "that's how I like my women" but it might misread and since my wife -- who is all three -- doesn't read these forums I wouldn't be scoring any points with her.) > 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. We do want to -- and plan to -- staff up the resources on all sides of the business, and Dean's group has the biggest needs right now. > 4. One word (or is it three?): Squeezeboombox. Interesting idea. Complicated, though, in terms of deciding just how good it should sound. Decent audio quality should keep it sub-$500, I would think, but if the audio quality expectations are for something higher it could climb over that. How attractive do you think it would be if it were under $500? How much does that change at more than $500? > 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. Mumble, mumble...great minds and all that... mumble, mumble. > I'd write more, but it's happy hour in Minnesota. Cheers and good luck, And since it is now happy hour here in Mt. View, I'm signing off too. -- JimC ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JimC's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9428 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31324 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
