I was thinking this morning as I was pulling into my office parking lot that the iPod I was listening to in my car should some how be able to automagically tell my computer exactly what song I was listening to, exactly where I stopped in that song, and start playing that song when I walked in the door. Is that realistic?
Let me answer that in a few ways:
- Basic iPod -- seems like I should be able to take a basic iPod in with me and the very first thing it should transmit is the data I described above and my computer should start right where I left off. Low tech, but functional and seemingly achievable.
- iPod Touch -- if I were in range of my work wifi network and I turned off the car, the iPod should wirelessly transmit that data to my computer; if there's no wifi network, then it should work the same as the basic iPod.
- iPhone (I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this) -- should use wifi or the data network to notify my computer.
Are there potential problems with this? Sure, especially if the computer it's trying to notify doesn't have the music on it, but that's a pretty simple test. In thinking more about it, my guess would be that it would probably be easiest to implement this in an iPhone if someone could figure out how to have the iPhone auto-trigger an e-mail that then triggered an automator response once received by the machine. That's kind of kludgy though, and it would be much cooler if iTunes was the black box for this process.
Yup, pretty much just like the iPhone, but a little bit more complex.
