Apple Remote and exclusivity

FROM : Elan Feingold
DATE : Mon Jun 02 21:44:48 2008

Hi,

The app I'm working on makes use of the Apple Remote; specifically, it 
runs a helper app (daemon) so that the app can be started with a press 
of the Apple Remote Menu button, and then passes key presses it 
receives to the app via UDP messages.

I'm seeing two issues:

1) Even though I open the device with kIOHIDOptionsTypeSeizeDevice, 
I'm seeing times where it seems to lose exclusivity. I can't pin it to 
any specific event (i.e. wake from sleep, etc.), but it definitely 
seems to lose it after a period of time (hours, days). After that 
hitting the Menu button brings up both the application *and* Front 
Row, which is not exactly optimal :-)

I read somewhere that if an application loses focus and then regains 
it, it should reopen the device to assure exclusivity. I'm not sure 
how this would work with a daemon that doesn't ever have focus in the 
application sense.

2) I'm seeing cases where key-presses on the Apple Remote are lost. It 
might be correlated with the actual application using a bit more CPU. 
I'm not sure if the process doing the Apple Remote reception needs to 
be run at a higher priority?

Any help you could offer would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

-elan