Coffee & Cocoa hot bits and bytes

It becomes a mess and I probably have contributed to that. Sorry!

More and more applications are being released that take advantage of Apples Remote Control. A good thing at the first glance.

When I released the first version of the Apple Remote Cocoa Source back in march I wrote about missing guidelines and a missing application switcher. The way the source interacts with the Remote Control is an exclusive one. Only one application can interact with the Remote Control at a time.

With any new application that supports the Apple Remote Control chances are getting higher that a user has at least two applications that want to use the Remote Control. Because of the exclusive way to interact with the Remote Control one app will win - the others will lose. Pretty bad user experience. If the mouse is nearby the user can dismiss a dialog or close the application. But more and more users are using the Mac in the living room as some kind of media center. They typically do not want to use a mouse or keyboard. They want to control the Mac by using the Remote Control.

Some days ago a couple of users asked about a way to make Sofa Control work with another application that also uses the Remote Control. I wrote the company that does the software but did not get back any reply until now. Even if we manage to resolve the glitch we need a way to do that in a professional way without communicating with each individual that makes a software that supports the Remote Control.

We need an API

Instead of communicating through IO services with the device we need a high level API. An API that acts as the middleman between the device and the applications that want to use the Remote Control. Events from the Remote Control shall be manageable like mouse or keyboard events.

I filled a feature request for that. rdar://problem/4632245

We need guidelines

With more and more applications using the Remote Control we need guidelines for button to action mappings. Those guidelines are needed to provide a consistent user experience. Without it, it is more or less luck if different applications are using the same mappings for similar actions.

Some questions that arise…

• Shall scrolling be done with Left/Right buttons or Plus/Minus?
• Do we need to categorize applications (e.g. Media Players, Document Browsers, …) and define button to action mappings for those categories (e.g. Play Hold shall switch between fullscreen/normal view)

Leopard

New APIs are typically introduced with new major releases of the OS. A first beta of Leopard is around the corner. Every new Mac is shipping with the Remote Control now and I really hope that there is at least one session at the WWDC that is titled Enhanced User Experience with the Remote Control or Front Row integration made easy or similar.

But what if not?

What happens if Apple does not release some official API? If this should really happen I would recommend starting an open source initiative that provides that API. And I would hope that most of the companies that support the Remote Control would join. But hopefully this will never be needed.

There are only three weeks left till we know it. Come on Apple…

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 15th, 2006 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Cocoa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.