Quote: Originally Posted by
redls1bird 
The idea is great, but i wouldnt trust it to the powermate. It is unreliable sometimes which makes life difficult without another input device. I originally wanted to go that rout as well. The only downside is using a control knob to navigate, you will be essentially just rotating it to tab through button choices. That means youll have to watch the screen more to tell where your cursor is.
The powermate is pretty unreliable...many people seem to have difficulty with it not initializing correctly after hibernation/resume.
Also, it is difficult to use a rotary knob like the Powermate that lacks physical indents (that "clicking" sensation felt when turning the control past one position) with a frontend, because you still are forced to look at the screen to determine whether a particular amount of rotation has selected the button you want to activate. With physical indents, the knob can simply be turned a single "clicks" or indents to select the next button by feel alone.
I don't think a touchpad is the ideal solution either, because you still must look at the screen and navigate the cursor (a small visual target) to the appropriate button while contending with the natural motion of the car. A touchscreen does not have this problem, since you touch the visual element that you want to select directly.
The BEST solution in terms of control is probably using individual hardware buttons that are discernible by touch for each function. However, fabrication is much more difficult! A good compromise is to have "soft" hardware buttons that correspond to particular portion of the screen, but change their function depending on the task at hand. For example, a button that always selects the first item in a list, whether that list is displaying music tracks or different modules (music, nav., etc.) within the frontend. I don't know of any front end that supports encoding hardware buttons in that manner, however.
EDIT:
It wouldn't be as difficult to implement hardware buttons that acted as softkeys as I originally thought. If the hardware buttons were tied to a program that would always "click" at a particular spot on the screen when pressed, then the content of the underlying button wouldn't matter, and there wouldn't need to be native frontend support...just a skin that placed the appropriate screen controls under the click point for each button. It would be very easy to then set up a tabular style interface (similar to the tabs in IE or Firefox), with each "tab" a separate module. If done correctly, much of the burden associated with finding the correct onscreen button to push could be eliminated through sufficient forethought in skin design. One program that could do this is AutoIT, a freeware scripting program that is very easy to use and highly configurable. Done. :-)
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