Inspiration for SlimCar

Both HarryBo and Woosey are prominent members of TalkAudio, the UK's largest car audio forum. Over the past few years, they have had the opportunity to use a huge variety of car audio equipment and to objectively evaluate it's usability. Being Computer Science graduates (or geeks, if you prefer), the idea of a car PC was always in the back of their minds.

Most current car PC solutions suffer from the classic "jack of all trades, master of none" problem. They aim to provide satellite navigation, DVD playback, music playback, car integration and frequently even more. This inevitably means that the systems are slow to boot up, unreliable, expensive and they tend to require a large LCD touchscreen which can be awkward to use on the move and attractive to thieves..

HarryBo and Woosey decided to look at the problem from a new angle. What do you really want from a car PC? The ability to maintain a large library of music in a variety of formats, and to browse/search/listen to it in an intuitive fashion. It just so happens that they had recently purchased Squeezeboxes and were very impressed with them. These units provide excellent sound quality and usability in a compact form factor with an attractive design. The backend software (SqueezeCenter) is a world-class example of music organisation software.

"So", Harry thought, "what about running it in a car?"

SlimCar was born...

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