Quote: Originally Posted by
golfguy 
It should be as easy or easier to navigate than an iPod.
I understand what you are saying and agree on principle, but the iPod's interface is both a boon and a bane.
For small (few hundred tracks) playlists it works fine, but more than that and I just find it cumbersome. The "letter skip" they added a while ago is also a bit painful for me personally. It seems like it always goes into that mode just as I about get to the track i'm looking for. And if you have a full computer in your car, why wouldn't you want all your music at your finger tips as it were (I know there are reasons).
Also the move from the rotary controller in the 1G to the touch pad was a bad one IMHO. With my old 1G due to the tactile feedback and the limited number of possible tracks, I used to be able to get within one or two tracks of my target without ever looking at the display. That is really the type of interface you need in the car (e.g. requires the absolute least amount of attention).
Quote:
Perhaps you can experiment with simulating an iPod touch wheel?
There are devices (some PnP, but others would take some electrical work and programming of their own) that are essentially a touch wheel that could be used. Emulating the TW on a standard touch screen would be difficult though as the things just aren't that accurate (try dragging things around the desktop with one and you should get the idea pretty quickly).
Quote:
Music control should resume from where your computer went to sleep when you turn the car off. Sounds easy, but it's probably not.
Actually it is. If you aren't playing via iTunes (like NBB, AMP, and I believe QCar), then unless the app pauses the track it will pick right back up when the system wakes up. If the FE does use iTunes, a simple listen for the wake up message and a play message to iTunes will do it.
Honestly I was all for immediately playing after wake until I wrote CFE. It was always supposed to do it, but by the time I got the rest of the code stable I had gotten used to it not playing when it woke up. It's of course always implementation, but AMP used to annoy me that it would actually be playing before my Amps had powered on so I missed parts of songs.
I will agree that it should be an option though so the user can decide how they want it to behave.
-dave