Topic: Streaming Radio - Artist/Song info?
So I've wanted one of these things since August but financially, there have been other priorities. Then the fiance managed to sneak one under the tree. Serious girlfriend points for that...
Anyway. As far as I'm concerned, Internet Radio alone makes this little sucker worth the cost of admission. It's kind of like a Slim Devices Squeezebox without the suck. Got me a Beta control panel, built me up seven or eight stations under My Streams, and boy howdy that was cool!
One advantage iTunes or Winamp or a Squeezebox has over the Chumby is that the other three give you track info (an advantage the Chumby has, of course, is that it doesn't require a computer... advantage Chumby). However, it would be nice if, instead of saying "Current: My Streams" followed by the station name, it instead said "Artist: Song" or even flipped between "Current: My Streams / Artist: Song." 'cuz I'm likely to have a pretty good idea what stream I set the Chumby to... but as it is now, if I wanna know what *song* I'm listening to I have to fire up the laptop.
What would be even better, of course, would be the option to scroll that information over the bottom of whatever channel the Chumby is set to like a Chyron crawl. I have no idea how tricky that would be, though as I don't code Flash (yet) and I'm a consummate hacker when it comes to Linux.
Alternatively, would it be possible to create a "Now Playing" widget that I could throw into my channels? Something that uses the "album cover" if it has one (like SomaFM does) for the background and the "now playing" information from the stream on top of it? Again, I don't code Flash (but this little gadget has inspired me to learn).
As an off-topic aside, has any thought been given to using the tilt sensor to scroll up and down lists? Set it slow and insensitive and let it reset once it's level again? It's pretty intuitive for me to want to see what's on the bottom of a list by leaving the Chumby on the coffee table but pushing its top so that it leans back... There's so many bells'n'whistles on the little gadget that it's a shame they aren't used for a more organic way of interfacing with the content. 'cuz really - that's something *nothing* else has. Accentuate the positive, right?