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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