Now that my Media Center is up and running (yes, yes I know, I will be posting the specs and pictures soon, as I am travelling on work in Brussels will do it when I get back), I have been thinking of how to extend that to make it a fuller experience (if there is such a word). Here are some things that I was thinking of integrating/extending/playing with (and hopefully have more stuff up on the sandbox). What else can you think of? Also, if you have something already working on this then let me know. My intention is eventually to release the bits (including code) for everyone - and to set expectations - that will happen once I have had a chance to check out the MCE SDK.
Emails: One thing is to integrate emails to it. Now I have no intention of writing emails using a remote, but if I can just download and read them, then that in itself is a big deal! Contacts: I would like to show up contacts from Outlook here including their mugshots. This way quite often when I need to call someone, I don’t need to boot up my laptop (on the rare occasions it is switched off)! Also this can be used to pick up numbers in the next one. Phone: Since I already have Vonage, maybe I can write something where I can trigger the phone call using this, and do either PC-to-Phone or potentially integrate Click2Call SMS: There are a few SMS gateways you can subscribe to, maybe I can use some of them.
There are a few products that do some of these already, some of which are paid like OneVoice , a few others are not . If I can get the code for the other plugins and extend them, then that would be the first choice - why reinvent the wheel. Do you have anything else you might want to see here?
[Listening to: 04-dzihan__and__kamien_-_ford_transit_160_lame_cbr - AsianLounge_Cd2 - AsianLounge_Cd2 (04:50)]