How to get new people interested in empeg?

empeg iPhone app

Discuss (assuming no intellectual property problems or a clever way around them).

A good portable mp3 player would be nice but needs more space. Unless it could access your collection over the internet somehow. To me the empeg was always about having all of your music at your finger tips. Didn't Hugo say something about that being his inspiration even ?

Does apple allow a "third party" "ipod" app on the iTouch/iPhone? I'm think they'd kill the proposal unfortunately. But wow it would be cool to see the "empeg" interface on an iPhone!

Apple's terms for the app store pretty much rule it out, you aren't supposed to submit software that duplicates standard functionality. Of course the only way to know for sure is to develop such and app and submit it

Or release it only for jailbroken Iphones. Has anyone here not jailbroken theirs?

Peter

What if you could download from the empeg to the iP* ?
You'd have all your music with you in the car and pick and choose what you want on the smaller device.

A version of empegface for a smart phone? Just need a vpn back to your empeg and a really fast, stable mobile connection. (Oh, well, scratch that one.)

-jk

Me. I haven't found any particular need to jailbreak it.

I couldn't find a compelling reason to jailbreak my touch, still can't....

What would an empeg iPhone/iPod app do exactly?

If you just want basic control then reskinning the HTML interface to be suitable for such a small screen would do.

Reimplementing an empeg style interface for the iPhone/iPod wouldn't be viable because of the refusal of Apple to approve it and the fact that the interface of the empeg is what is special about it. That UI and underlying code is what took all those man years to write.

Use slingplayer or skype over 3G?

The Empeg UI itself would be a bit pointless, as the whole point was optimising it for the very few buttons and very low-res screen that the car-player had. It's the underlying code, including the playlisting and organisational features, that would make more sense to rewrite for Iphone -- though that's now less like Firefox31's idea of getting new people interested in the Empeg as such.

And I imagine an app doesn't get enough access to USB to implement mass-storage, though there'd be nothing stopping it having enough of an FTP server to allow music to be added over Wifi with zero install footprint on Windows or Mac computers. It might even be worth investigating how much of a mini-CIFS server you'd need to implement, to be mountable as a drive letter from Windows.

Peter

Most recent versions of Windows can mount WebDAV...

What about an empeg app for something like the Palm Pre? Maybe that would have more of a chance of getting new blood into the bbs, it may also have a bit more use as Apple have stopped iTunes sync on the Pre with the latest release. There has to be a gap in the market there!

I am struggling to imagine what would be very empeg about it though, as Peter points out I don't think the interface would really work.

Cheers

Cris.

The first thing I'm going to do when I have some time is play around with a Pre-friendly skin for the httpd. I've already got a wireless bridge in my trunk that's wired in to my empeg in the dash, so in theory, all I need to do is run it in AP mode instead of bridge mode and I should be able to connect to it.

If that all works well, I might work on getting something a little more custom going.

One fun idea would be, if the Mojo APIs provide a way to detect that a call is coming in, the Pre could mute the empeg, or switch it to AUX or something for speakerphone. It could display the phone number/caller name on the Empeg display if the APIs are there.

RSS/arbitrary web content on the empeg display would be pretty doable as well, I think. Probably only useful for short headline scrolls, sports scores, maybe a weather crawl or something.

One really "far out there" thought I had was that the Pre could pick up the song that's playing, fetch lyrics from lrcdb, and load them into emphatic on-demand. That would be pretty cute, but would involve me digging into codebases (emphatic and lrcdb) I've basically ignored for several years now.

The cool thing about the Pre is that it's so hackable, I think anything Palm doesn't give us via the SDK we can eventually hack in with kernel shims a la Hijack. I created this page on the Pre developer wiki with my initial attempts to replace the factory kernel, and several folks have chimed in with further progress on getting one that works 100% like the original. At that point, we can probably beg/borrow/steal any kind of info that Palm doesn't give us via Mojo.

So, lots of possibilities, I think -- finding the time to play with them all is, as usual, the limiting factor.

Not since 2.0 came out. And even prior to that, I didn't keep my phone jailbroken for long. The hacker part of me liked it, but I just didn't have much practical use for anything it offered.

The one thing that would tempt me is the ability to tether in an emergency, but I managed to snag NetShare to fill that need. 3.0 on a 3GS still hasn't killed NetShare.

As I had my phone stolen on holiday, I have been looking at this and various siboings and friends are trying to persuade me down the iPhone route, but aside from the phone, there is nothing the iPhone offers that I want unless I get it jailbroken. Most of the apps I would want on it will never be approved by Apple (I guess)

So you're not wanting a fart app then?

Apple are proud of having something like 60000 apps on the app store but man... so many of them are utter crap. I wouldn't want to even waste the time spent on downloading and installing on them even if they are free apps. There are so many useless apps that it is actually hard to find the actually useful ones.

Out of curiosity, what apps are you wanting?


The same pretty much applies to Windows Mobile, or Windows/Mac/Linux. It's a matter of knowing either how to search for what you want, or knowing good review sites to help you discover new apps. Any successful computing platform has a ton of crap as well as decent apps.

Oh I know that other platforms have junk as well. The app store just seems to have a particularly high number of frivolous apps. I'm sure this is because of all the hype generated by Apple themselves and the media about how the app store is the next big thing. Everybody and their dog has decided to pay Apple their annual $99 developer fee and release anything and everything. So long as it doesn't potentially interfere with their own areas like this "empeg iPhone" app or the areas concerning their official partners *cough*NetShare*cough*, it is in Apple's interest to approve everything. You could be making thousands a day by creating your very own fart app!

I just want the the actual app store application to have a better sorting system or something. It is hard to find things in there with just the sheer number of apps in the very limited number of categories.

I'm still not sure what an empeg iPhone app would do that would drum up interest in the empeg and this forum. There aren't particularly many empegs units out there anyway which has already significantly reduced the potential userbase to the people with an empeg and an iPhone/iPod touch. If it is just an empeg themed or empeg inspired music player then you'd run foul of the no competing with built in apps rule.

If you just want new people then you'd just open up a subforum to support some random reasonably popular application. Doubt that'd be a good idea however...

Most, in the wrong hands, would come under the category of hacking tools :-) I'm talkign about crypto breakers, WLAN dis-re-associaters, bruteforcers, rainbowtable gateways etc

The essential tools of the trade

An empeg app for iPhone or Pre (nice idea Cris) would give users a new perspective on accessing their music. As a skin on the native player, many unique empeg features would be missing, so it would be a novelty. Sure better than most iPhone novelties.

Picture this visualization: Hold your iPhone/Pre in landscape mode, watching an empeg visualization or info display. Pinch the screen to zoom out, revealing the buttons and knob. Tap the on screen buttons and spin the knob, navigating the menus to do your thing. When done, "pinch out" to zoom in on the vis.

Take the idea further: Adapt the iPhone/Pre paradigms to the empeg UI. Pinching, higher res vis/info, horizontal menus with weighted finger scrolling, even scroll up/down through expanded menus, portrait (square) visualizations and paragraph mode lyrics display, etc.

It wouldn't be "empeg" without the storage technologies and hackability, but it would be a neat UI to get some buzz and some new blood on the BBS.

Nokia N900 then

They come as standard...

(well, it's so easy to get that it's almost true)

Rather than try and emulate the buttons and knob on the Empeg, surely a touchy interface on an iPhone/Pre/Android would work better with a iPeng or SqueezeControl style interface. It would be fun for back seat passengers to flick through your music on a phone if you had wireless in your car, or it could turn your Empeg into a serverless Squeezebox Duet at home. Album art and info could be got online and it could be a cute, fun and useful project.

I'm picturing, but it just doesn't seem appealing. shrug

Yeah - the N900 is streets ahead of the iPhone for me, so that's probably the way I'll go.