Where is my Apple remote control? Ask Sony!

In some quarters speculation has been running rampant about 'What is the hidden intent of the Mac mini?'. Some have pointed to the appearance of Mr Ando of Sony at MacWorld as being significant.

To my mind the missing ingredient of any truly distributed home entertainment system is the remote control. Using a remote to manipulate menus on your TV is just plain silly if you are trying to get music stored on your 'digital hub' to play on speakers in the kitchen. The remote needs to have a screen.

As well as a screen, it needs just a few controls to manipulate the menus - not a tabletPC, not a PDA with a stylus and not a mobile phone. Enter the gaming consoles. Who has user interaction with screen-based, domestic mobile devices sorted out better?

A Wi-Fi enabled PSP might be overkill but it would be a start. With a price in excess of $249 for the Wi-Fi option it also looks pricey, until you see what Sonos is all about and how much they charge for a remote (answer: $399).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SmartLink

Image
In a previous post I tried to describe how I thought technologies like SmartTags and AutoLink ought to behave. With greasemonkey in Firefox I've been able to build a proof-of-concept demonstrator. For the moment I'm calling it Smart Tag/Auto Link. SmartLink is based upon the idea that content authors should mark-up content that can be 'smart-linked', using standard XHTML constructs. This has two advantages: it effectively provides an 'opt-in' mechanism for content providers it doesn't require 'magic' to identify what can be smart-linked and thus provides a much more extensible approach. of course there is one fairly major disadvantage: there isn't any suitably marked-up content out there, with the exception of some test posts I've put together for the purpose. Getting Started If you want to know a bit more about SmartLink then click here . Alternatively if you want to see how SmartLink behaves and you're using Firefox t
Read more

A Review of hReview

microformats may well represent a path from where we are today to the [lowercase] semantic web. If so, one of the first waypoints along such a path could be the emergence of aggregators capable of taking advantage of suitably marked-up content. Applying a 'microformat' approach to tagging, Technorati introduced the rel="tag" approach to marking-up tags. Technorati also supply the corresponding aggregation service, e.g. see posts tagged with microformat . Given this minimalist approach to tagging, the hReview specification comes as something of a surprise. It seems to represent a format developed independently of the environment in which it is most likely to be used. The rel="tag" approach makes a major, simplifying assumption. This is that the tag refers 'to a major portion of the current page (i.e. a blog post)' . I am assuming that it could apply equally to a blog entry in an RSS/Atom feed. Thus an aggregator can associate a tag with two p
Read more

Speculations about developing with iCloud

It's been three months since Apple revealed it's vision of the cloud to the world. After its introduction, much was written (e.g. It Just Works ) about how iCloud compares 'philosophically' with others, most obviously Google. Now, supposedly close to launch and with iCloud in the hands of developers, there seems to be surprisingly little written about how that philosophy translates into developing a modern iOS app. Apple promises consumers that things 'will just work'. Just keep using apps in the same way and they will magically remain up-to-date across all your devices - in truth I'm not sure more magic was promised. Apple might be making a similar offer to developers. In principle iCloud means that an ObjectiveC developer with XCode can create and distribute apps containing this magical ingredient without having to learn any new skills, without having to develop any cloud-based components at all. What's more, with relatively little extra work, they c
Read more