I am beginning work on a new software project for the Empeg which would allow playlist creation on the fly via a PDA. The concept is this: You select songs on your PDA by looking through soup views on the PDA. These soup views are downloaded to the PDA in a database file created by Jemplode like the XML or CSV files are created. After you have selected the files from your PDA, you would then beam the list to the Empeg via IrDA, and the Empeg would enqueue/replace/append/insert the files in the current playlist using the new xxxx! or such Serial port commands. There would have to be a small program running on the Empeg to recieve the IrDA communications and output them to the serial port, but it could be written to be a generic server listening for IrCOMM or such.

I can see this application being very useful in the car, when your passenger asks you "So what all do you have on your Empeg?". I will be sure to make the interface intuitive enough so it can be picked up and used by anyone.

Here is what I have done so far: I have written a Palm .pdb creator in Java that can easily be integrated with Jemplde to create a .pdb file that can be used on the Palm. I have written a bit of Palm code to read from that .pdb file and display some items on the screen. Since I'm just learning Palm programming, I'm taking baby steps :-) At first I was worried that the playlist size would be too large for the Palm platform, but I think that will not be a problem. I estimate that my playlist of 5800 songs would fit into a 1.75M .pdb file. People with large collections would have to make sure their PDA has enough memory.

Before going too far into this project I wanted to know the spread of PDA ownership on this board. This will help me decide what kind of development environment I will use to write the PDA application. I own a Palm Vx, so it will certainly run on the Palm platform. I could write the app using Waba or SuperWaba, a Java development environment for Palm and WinCE devices, but it has limitations that I may run into that C would not. If I develop it in C, I would have to be very careful to write the app so it could be ported easily to other platforms, and it would requre some work on those other platforms before it could run on them. So, here (finally) is the poll:



Any other suggestions would be welcome, and if you select the Other category, could you let me know what kind of PDA you have? Thanks!