Since we are on the topic, Steve

A quick perusal of TUAW today yielded an article about how Apple might be working on an iPhone app that would be able to play shared media from your other computers. I found it particularly funny because I had been pondering a similar feature late last night and was even going to post about it. But now I have to.

This is so backwards it isn’t even funny. I mean, yea, being able to play local media on your remote device is cool because then you don’t have to bog down what limited storage space you have, but the order of control is going the wrong way.

Remote controls take effect on something out of reach, and change that device’s activity. Having a 200gig music library on your iPhone is only useful if you are within your home network, at which point you could probably just set iTunes to a playlist or Party Shuffle, and then ideally, pipe the music through your Airport Express.

Now it seems we’ve stumbled across something. The music is now playing across your whole house, instead of just in your little headphones or iPod-compatible speaker product. This is way better, but wait.. in order to change that track I have to go all the way over to the computer, shake the mouse and click through to the next track. Wouldn’t it be great if we had an Apple-compatible device with a nice screen and intuitive controls that was network-enabled and it was already in our pockets? LIKE THE IPHONE??

We’ve already got “screen sharing,” a Cupertino-refreshed flavor of VNC, and I’ve used an iPhone port that worked great back when my Touch was jailbroken (living the straight and narrow these days). Now imagine being able to get track information, remix playlists and increase the volume all with a swipe of the finger, from anywhere on the network. Apple TV functionality would be a no-brainer.

In all honestly, my original post was just that you should be able to play music from your portable Wifi device straight to an Airport Express, negating the need for physical cable hookup, but the backwards nature of this rumor got me worked up.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about being able to watch my movies and play my music on my iPod without having the sync it. But we can all agree that the bits are flowing backwards in that scenario. It’s manipulation of the mothership, the server, that we want remotely.

Please, Steve?