Tod came up with this idea while we were out to lunch today...

Some of us on the BBS were griping recently about a certain behavior of the buttons on the Mk2 units. It goes like this:

You turn the volume knob so up pops the volume dialog. But now you're done adjusting the volume and you want to do something else, like change tracks. But oh, too bad mate, you can't because if you press left or right it won't change tracks. (Well, the first press doesn't change tracks anyway, it just clears the dialog box. In the old days it was a throwback to the Mk1 where L/R adjusted volume when the dialog was up... at least it now it clears the dialog, which is better than the former behavior, but still not perfect...)

Anyway, to do something else once the volume dialog is up, you have to either wait until the dialog disappears, or you have to press the button twice. Ah, but what if you press the button twice and the dialog has already disappeared, well, then you've skipped twice and that's not what you wanted to do, argh. But if you deliberately wait and watch until the dialog has disappeared, well then where are your eyes? Not on the road, where they're supposed to be, I'll tell you that.

I literally watched Tod taking his eyes off the road and nearly wrecking the car, multiple times, as he struggled with this. Both in terms of switching tracks after a volume change, and also when trying to do the long-down-press to toggle the visual screen on/off after a volume change.

Now, I've argued before that this "feature" should work differently in the Mk2 player software, but the argument of "user interface consistency" was bandied about a bit... well... let's just say the answer was "no" and not revisit that at the moment.

Now here's the fun part: The remote control works FINE, exactly like I'd want it to work. When the volume dialog is up, pressing L/R on the remote simply switches tracks while leaving the volume dialog up just fine. This is GOOD.

Okay... so here's Tod's idea... Can Hijack just detect when the volume dialog is up, and optionally substitute the IR commands when fascia buttons are pressed, for the duration of the volume dialog's lifespan?