Gum Under The Seat, take 0.1

For years, I have been piecing together little menuing systems of different sorts for firing up music or videos on whatever box was hooked up to the stereo. When the Mac mini came out, I had to have one. Unfortunately, a menuing system that met all of my needs has yet to arrive. I thought Front Row would do it, but it's very limited, although quite lovely. Gum Under The Seat is my latest incarnation, and I thought I'd offer it up to the world.

Requirements:
• Mac OSX Tiger
• If you want to play videos or VIDEO_TS directories, you'll need NicePlayer. Get the Xine plugin if you want to play files that Quicktime doesn't understand.

Nice to haves:
• If you want to watch TV, get an EyeTV
• If you want to use a remote, get a KeySpan Express Remote or similar.
• If you want to dial the phone from your address book, get a Vonage account

Since the GUI just presents lists, anything that can be presented as a list could possibly be controlled. So far, modules have been written for:
- videos
- iTunes
- EyeTV channels
- EyeTV recordings
- Vonage dialer for Address Book entries
- Scripts directory

Other ideas:
- iChat buddies list with Video or audio invite
- X10 control
- Web bookmarks

The pieces included are:
1. The "server". This is the guts of the system, and has a small embedded web server.
2. The "client", in this case a Dashboard widget.
3. Pieces for configuring the keyspan remote.

Current issues:
1. If the widget loses focus, the only way to get it back is with the mouse. If the machine sits attached to a television, then this isn't really an issue. Hopefully someone will help me eliminate this problem.
2. Sometimes it doesn't stop one thing before starting another.
3. It's not the prettiest thing. Someone will make the widget much prettier, I'm sure.
4. It doesn't know anything about Videos in iTunes.