Sometime around last Christmas season I was stuck in a traffic jam, and a couple of dudes broke the passenger’s seat window and stole my iPhone. Gotta love the third world. What I’ve been missing the most about my favorite toy is the Remote app, that allows you to control iTunes remotely, and even change the room where the music is being played through Airtunes.

Starting in March I’ll be joining a hot startup, TuneWiki, working on a desktop app, and I was needing to get some hands-on experience with the technology I’ll be using there. So I started building a replacement for the iPhone’s Remote app (using C++/Qt for those who care). Here’s the first release:

http://www.alpeb.com/itunesremoteweb/iTunesRemoteWeb_0.1.zip

This is a very early prototype. It only works on Windows so far, and it only lets you browse your playlists and select songs to play. The interface is not pretty.
Unzip-it and double-click on iTunesRemoteWeb.exe . For testing, point your browser to http://localhost:16000 . The idea is to use this from other computers in your home network, so you need to find out what IP has your router assigned to the computer where you installed this, and replace “localhost” with that IP.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible possible to command Airtunes through an app like this, at least in Windows. I’ll be porting this to Mac as well, and maybe there it is possible. Also the plan is to include this functionality into pulpTunes, in a much cleaner way of course.