alistairphillips.com

I’m : a web and mobile developer based in the Manning Valley, Australia.


Apple Home Media Server

It has always felt like Apple could do "one more thing" and offer the ultimate in the way of a home media system. Something to hold all of my iThings that would let me access content while in the home via my iDevices and when on the road. How awesome it would be to be able to stream or request one of your movies or music files streams from your home network to your iPhone.

The Apple TV solves one part of this and does allow access to content on your TV but it's all focused about the iTunes library from your Macbook, iMac or MacBook Pro. It's definitely not unusual to have many computers in one household and why should all content be forced onto one machine with it's iTunes library?

Once upon a time it was fair to assume that 8 or even 16GB was far too much music to carry in your pocket but these days it's video, photo's and applications. And the video content alone chomps up a huge chunk of the storage. There have often been times where I've wanted to watch the next episode of a show which I know is sitting in my iTunes library but being unable to get access to it. And what about that one track you forget to sync which you're suddenly craving too?

An on-the-go-auto-request-sync playlist would solve some of this but not offer the instant gratification that we've all come to expect (and demand really). Give us a centralised media server that is available both locally and externally via the Internet. Throw in Time Machine functionality for multiple devices and you're well on your way to a great "one more thing" product.

Hopefully all the quirks of me.com have been resolved so why not shove in another new feature, cloud backup. Yeah there is iDisk (sans SSL and general security ) but how about something more akin to Amazon S3 where you pay for your actual storage requirements. That way you can storage as much or as little you need. Time Machine could be enhanced to integrate with this and allow you to store critical files in the cloud automatically. That way should anything go wrong locally you've at least got automatic access to remote backups (including history) of critical files.

Of course this almost gets me started on wanting Apple to offer a Google Apps style service for MobileMe...

[ Rumours courtesy of http://www.9to5mac.com/apple-home-server ]