"One remote to rule them all".
MC is truly awesome as a library. Once you've ripped, tagged, analyzed, organized, rated, zoned etc. you just want to play right? And you want to show off all your good work to your mates/spouse/dog etc, so it's gotta be easy to use. And this is social, so it's gonna be displayed on the big TV, sound via the AV rig - the HTPC. This is where hairstyle should come in to its own. What I need is:
* lock in hairstyle mode (too easy to escape out of now)
* easy, intuitive navigation
* view & play playlists (inc random play)
* view "playing now" list
* Reorder playing now list
* browse the library (by Album, Artist....) and send tracks to playing now
* Rate a song while it's playing
* Player controls - Play/Pause/Skip/Volume/Mute (always visible)
* My wife says - "This is sweeeeet- so easy!"
Ideally, all with an IR remote (this is the hard bit). I'd compromise to PDA control - Hairstyle on an IPAQ!
Most of this is already there - it's just not intuitive at the moment.
I've looked at myhtpc but not used it in anger. What are the key features the you guys like about it? Do you use a mouse or an IR remote?
To make life easier for the JRiver guys, maybe we need to come up with a "must have" features list for hairstyle. There's a million things they could do - what's mandatory for you guys?
The back-end of MC is perfect, we've just got to "sex up" the front end. Get it right and hairstyle will become the key selling feature for the product.
Al.