Signal - The Ultimate Remote Control for Your PC's Media Player

As you may have heard, today Apple announced a free native application called Remote for the iPhone and iPod touch, and that this app seems quite similar to a certain other product you may be familiar with. Naturally this has raised a few questions:

Did Apple purchase Signal?

No, Apple has implemented their own solution.

Did Alloysoft patent the idea?

No, as there was prior art even back when Signal was first created.

What happens now?

For the immediate future the plans for Signal remain unchanged. The native iPhone client is still under development and will still be released as planned. This will be a great new feature for all Signal users, including many requested changes and offering substantial performance improvements over the web client on the device. Winamp and Windows Media Player users will of course continue to benefit from all of Signal’s functionality, and for iTunes users Signal already offers features that the Apple product lacks such as the ability to queue up tracks, view internet radio station info, and automatically fetch album art.

Following the native iPhone release the Windows Mobile client will receive a UI update as promised, and there are plans to further expand the web interface to provide support for additional devices and even simpler controls from other Macs and PCs.

So while a free Apple product may well have an impact on the business, Signal isn’t going away anytime soon. Be on the lookout for continued software updates.

Now and then I get asked where the idea for Signal came from and how this all got started. Signal’s history is actually a bit longer than you might expect, so for the curious among you here is the tale:

Signal’s story actually begins back in 2001. A bunch of friends and I had just moved to Denver after all being hired straight out of college. After adjusting to a new city, a real job, and actually earning income(!), it was unanimously decided that Life Was Good. This naturally led to more than a few parties, and our place being the biggest (and coolest) was usually the venue of choice. Of course any good party needs good music and this function was served by an MP3 collection delivered through Winamp on my PC. People could queue up songs, add new songs into the library, or just go jump to something particular in the playlist. This all worked out great except for one problem: drunk people kept spilling stuff all over my keyboard.

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I’m in San Francisco this week for the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, soaking up tips and tricks for developing on the iPhone, enjoying the company of fellow developers, and taking advantage of the huge number of Apple engineers and many other interesting people in attendance. The week has been a blast so far, and I’m looking forward to even more before heading home to apply everything I’ve learned. If you’re at the conference and would like to say hello, shoot me a message on Twitter - I’d love to talk to you.

Signal 1.1.2 is now available, and is a bug fix release addressing a compatibility issue with Safari 3.1.1 as well resolving a few other minor issues:

• Hidden iTunes playlists are no longer displayed within the media library
• Selecting speakers with a CD selected in the iTunes window now works
• Fixed playlist sorting to sort playlists starting with lower-case characters properly

A common request for the Mac version has been to move Signal to a menu bar icon so that it no longer takes up space in the dock. In the past most of the development focus has been on building up the web interface, so admittedly the Mac interface was put together quickly so that more time could be spent on making the web interface look good and perform well.

I’m happy to say that not only has your request been heard, but done one better - in the upcoming 1.2 release Signal is moving to a System Preference Pane. This allows Signal to run completely in the background with no UI whatsoever unless called upon. As an added bonus Signal will now start when your Mac starts, so it’s always available whenever you need it.