Slim Devices understands their market
Posted on December 11, 2003
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 123 views |
I postulate: Geeks tend to be early-adopters of technology. Geeks tend to like to hack their technology. Geeks create. Ergo: any new technology that lets geeks hack it in a creative way will be readily and quickly adopted by geeks.
Slim Devices makes a damned cool piece of hardware called the Squeezebox, a device that they seem to have a hard time describing on their site (lots of “it does…” rather than “it is…”) but in a nutshell: it’s an audio tramission device for streaming mp3’s from your computer to your digital stereo wirelessly. As well it allows you to control the audio playback from the Squeezebox device - no need to head over to the computer to see track info or skip to the next song. A very, very nice little package (though the price feels a bit steep to me at $299 US).
What really sets it apart though is that the server powering it is written entirely in Perl and has been open sourced since Day 1, which means some people have been very, very busy hacking away at it and generally extending it nicely. For instance:
2003-10-11 : Mike Coglianese has posted a couple of plug-ins for SlimServer, one for showing TV listings and another for browsing the contents of Eudora mailboxes.
Even their installation process was augmented by their users:
Initially, I wrote a simple graphical application (in AppleScript!) that acted as a launcher for our server software, but this was really not good enough for Mac users. One of our Open Source contributors, Dave Nanian, came to the rescue and built us a System Preferences pane and installer application that work as they should on a Mac. - How Perl Powers the Squeezebox
(Take a few minuted to continue reading that article, over on O’Reilly, for more interesting insights into their development mentality).
Not only does Slim Devices encourage this practice, they’re running a development community dedicated to promoting the mods that their users create. This is a company that seems to truly understands who’s going to be using their toys, but more importantly understands that they’ve created something that could be very powerful and interesting, above and beyond the features they’ve implemented.
In software it’s not unusual for developers to trick out their applications with hooks that let other applications inter-op with them. On the Mac this is often done via AppleEvents; in Unix applications pipe their output into other applications with trivial ease. The software industry pretty much takes it for granted that users will want to use their creations in ways the original developer never imagined; in fact it’s considered a sign of success. It’s great to see at least one hardware company coming to the same conclusion. (Via The Farm)