|
Dave,
There are a couple of things to consider here, but the first is to jet back for a second and think a bit about your overall UI design.
I would encourage you to be very careful about having too much on the screen, or too many actions that have to be decided between at any given point in time.
It's not unreasonable to have a considerable degree of modality in your UI, as long as you think carefully about how to navigate it. Having bindings for every plugin active at the same time does not seem like a good idea to me. Having a way to get quickly to a point where a mini-app/plugin can be activated (think Dashboard, or the iPhone home screen) sounds much better.
One of the biggest gripes I have with every car player UI to date is that they hopelessly clutter the display with crap. If I'm in the middle of selecting something from a list, wasting 50% of the display with the current time, temperature, a mini audio spectrum display, fifteen buttons and the application's logo is just silly. I want to see the list, some way to back out of making the selection, and a simple reminder of what exactly it is that I'm doing...
If you're not familiar with the Nulooq, you should check one out. It's roughly analagous to 9 buttons, a rotary encoder and a three-position momentary switch. The software allows you to bind arbitrary keystrokes to each of these operations, and repeat/hold them in a variety of ways.
If you're keeping to a fairly modal design, it should be possible in any given context to do something pretty sane with the controller.
= Mike
|