Screens Environment is a multi-platform component based middleware research project designed to connect technologies together and provide better user experiences for the future of computing http://sourceforge.net/projects/screensos/
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Smart Playlists
Nearly all the latest handhelds have music capabilities.
Many of us have huge collections of music files on our PC.
But with very small SD/MMC/MS cards there is not much room
to store the vast amount of music we have available.
So we manually move files back and forth which results in alot of
wasted time. Many of us are just to lazy or frustrated to do this so we leave
songs on our handhelds for even a month or two swapping just a few songs.
An object storage could ease this by allowing to select files from your PC and allow them to 'swap' daily/weekly or even monthly on your handheld's capacity. However who has time to do this while at home/work, so why not do so on the way... have your entire music collection meta-data downloaded to your handheld and do the playlists from there (the meta-data is for sure smaller than the music itself). You could while on the bus create playlists, attach them to appointments (for start/end of the online range in which the playlists music should be on the device) and when you hotsync after the start of the appointment it will include the music files on the 'sync' and after the end of the appointment it will remove the files from the device making room for another playlist or other data. You can make the appointments recursive so that they continue to download once a month, week and so on. The user interface could make this functionality very usable by doing all the appointment work for you.
If we took this a step further, we could say that all music with a high-rating are not rotated which means that if you like a specific track, just mark it high-rating and it will stay on the device even after the playlist's appointment has ended.
The idea is that once the basic framework is implemented you can take this to boldy go where no one has gone before. I have asked many users and they dream for this feature. This is one of the reasons why I am pushing so hard on the object storage. It is crucial for the object storage to take these dreams into reality.
This idea could be extended to other file types like documents. Wouldn't you like to not have to remember to download that presentation for next months meeting without downloading it now? I know many times that files that I wanted on my handheld were only valid on a specific date range. By not limiting the object type, it would allow to extend the same idea to any set of objects. This brings us one step closer to a world where it is not limited to 'NOW' but can remember tasks for the future. Isn't that one of the main reasons we have handhelds... NOT to forget future tasks... why cant it try and do some of them for us so that we dont even need to remember.
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1 comment:
Seems like a GREAT idea Zakai - I would love to run your system on my PDA! It would be really nice to organize playlists on the go without actually needing to have all the songs on the drive - if no space available.
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