Thread: Newbie: State of the Car Mac

So today I was stoked about the prospect of putting a mac mini in my car. I had high hopes, but it appears that these might be crashing down around me. I've been skimming and searching posts for the better part of 3 hours now, but I figured maybe you old hands could save me time and just level with me.

It seems there are a number of areas that are "troubling"...

• GPS. I hadn't looked into this too much. I knew that there are several options available to Windows users, I figured at least one solution would be lurking in OS X. I thought Route Buddy would be good, but according to all you guys, it's anything but. And there doesn't seem to be much else in the catalog...
  
• Speech Recognition. Don't say it can't be done. All discussions of microphone/voice quality aside, Ford does this (using Microsoft technology! ), with surprisingly good results from what I hear.
  
  • MacSpeech's new product Dictate recently came out, and even won a 2008 Best In Show award at Macworld. However, when I emailed them, they basically told me it wouldn't work.
  • I'm not looking for complete control of the 'puter, but I would like some generic commands like "Play artist [artist]" to work. Using the generic Speakables/Speech Recognition, I would have to make a custom script for each playlist, artist, album, or whatever I wanted to filter by. Unacceptable. It should be able to recognize the command ("Play Artist"), and then take whatever follows as a search parameter.
  • Does anyone have any insight as to how Ford pulled it off, either software or hardware-wise?
  
  
• Front End. This seems to be the worst of the bunch, and at first I didn't think I'd even need it. I figured I would just use FrontRow, but then I was like "well, it would be nice to have GPS and stuff all tied together". I can't even count the number of threads about front ends. What is out there that is actually usable? It seems to be fashionable to start programming a front-end, but then stop midway through development.
  
• Apple-made carputer? I saw some stuff that suggested Apple might be working on their own in-car systems (in conjunction with Mercedes I think). Is this just a tantalizing rumour?

I'm not really interested in running anything in Parallels or Fusion. Assuming that the following list is all of my requirements, should I just not even try? I'm assuming that this is more or less what everyone wants, but I don't want to start down this path unless I am fairly confident that I will end up 100% satisfied with the results.

• In-Car GPS
• iTunes/music - I could care less about DVD/movie playback
• Speech controls for iTunes (a must) and GPS (preferably)
• FM radio (AM would be a nice-to-have)
• Stateful music memory - that is, resume whatever was happening when the ignition was turned off, whether that's a track in iTunes or a radio station. This is probably just a nice-to-have, but I can imagine myself getting very annoyed at having to reset the music every time I turn on the car, especially if I don't have voice controls and I am sifting through 30GB of music...
• It would be nice if all the people working on different Front Ends could agree on a modular FE system, and collaborate on that.
  
  • That way, you don't have a highly-fragmented development community because Dev A needs GPS and Dev B only wants Audio. If you don't want/need a feature, then it won't be in your front end.
  • Designing your architecture against one static set of requirements is just bad form. I don't have satellite radio, buy maybe if Sirius/XM do merge, I'll get one later and pop it in.
  • Ideally then, you could divide up the tasking, having one person focus on the GPS module, one on music, etc. Starting with a modular framework also gives you the flexibility to add stuff later that you hadn't even considered at conception.
  • Yes, I am a software engineer, but no, I have no experience programming for OS X, unfortunately.