My wife is somewhat technology adverse. I would like to put icons on her desktop that would control Casatunes and so that she could click on it and have it initiate some actions on the casatunes server. For example, it would be great to choose zone(s), source device, music and volume. A url might look something like this:

mediaserver/casatunes/?zone=1, device=2, music=playlist:playlist=“In the Mood”, volume=26

An icon with that information could be put on her desktop and and she could easily click to choose what she wanted. I think this would be a great tool for installers as well.

Good idea, Brent.
We are introducing a “Web Services” interface for CasaTunes very shortly. With that you could possibly set up some small programs that do what you want without needing to open the browser. Just create a program that, when clicked, turns on the zone, selects the source, picks a playlist and sets the preset volume by sending the info to CasaTunes via the CasaTunes Web Service. Click it again to turn off the zone.
Another option, if you can fish some wires in the wall is to place some CasaTunes Keypads in a couple locations. Set up a couple of the CasaTunes sources with groups of songs and then she could just hit the power button and the source button. Personally, although I love our app for the iPhone and our browser interface, I really like to have a Keypad that I can simply go to and hit the power key to turn the music on and off.
I’ll pass along your suggestion to the programmers.

Hi Brent, as Kim mentioned this is a great idea.  Although we don’t support a RESTful interface, we can create a sample command line utility using the new web services.  We will consider making this utility open source so others can customize and extend it if they are looking for some capabilities that are not included.  Please stay posted.  If you are a programmer and would be interested in helping us develop this utility, let me know.

Please see http://www.casatunes.com/multi-room-audio/index.php/forums/viewthread/74/ for info on our new command line capability.

I finally worked with the CasaCommand utility last night. Great Utility! Thanks for providing us with such an easy to use product.

One suggestion I had after working with it for awhile is, when you use a search function such as /SearchPlayLists you get an error unless you have selected a zone. To me it seems that you should be able to do add music by only selecting a source. There may be several zones connected to a source and changing the music in the source will change it for all zones and so the SearchPlayLists seems to be more source related than zone related.

I am anxious to start using the SDK as well.

Brent, you are quite right.  This was done because in future products each zone may have its own dedicated sources.

But even if each zone had a dedicated source, it is the still the source where the music is in the queue and not the zone. To me it seems like the source is like a cd player and the zones are like the speakers. You put the music in the cd player (or source) and not the speakers. Regardless, thanks for the great product.