This is Coolio. He’s a little penguin, and he lives with me. Coolio loves Music. In fact, he’s a real rapper, like his idol lending his name. He can really get on one’s nerves with that… But he loves other stuff as well and he collected tons of music on my home server. He put all of my CDs there plus tons of his own stuff. Real cool.

Then he likes to play this stuff through my Stereo and my streaming clients. Now problems started. Coolio is rather small, even for a penguin. So he really hates to climb up the desk to get access to my PC to browse the music library. I also hate him doing that since it really doesn’t help with working, browsing and all the other stuff I do on my PC. And he also hates to have to run to the stereo to look at the display to browse the music library. And then the browsing itself! 7,200 songs. On a text display. 5 lines at a time! And the remote… Penguin ain’t got fingers, Penguin got wings!

So, not, that’s not the right stuff for my little penguin. So he really gets nervous when Apple brings out this cool new gadget called ‘iPhone’. Coolio is really into gadgets. Always got to have the latest ones. Although… He doesn’t really want a phone, got better phones here. But the User interface! That’s real sleek. You can even use it with a wing! So Coolio get’s himself one of the first iPod Touch’s around. Really excited to use it with his music library…

But then… Ye’know.. He’s using SqueezeCenter and Squeezebox and that’s quite versatile, but the user interfaces… Fine for a PC, but an iTouch, with WINGS? That’s where I enter the story. I mentioned it before: He can REALLY get on one’s nerves! So (sigh) I sit down and start to write a little iPhone/iTouch skin for his SqueezeCenter. Can’t be THAT difficult…

Months later… My fingers start to feel like wings themselves. From coding (nights of it) as well as from testing the stuff, but, hey, this really starts to look cool…