REST and the iPod

Something occurred to me a while back, which I choose not to mention, essentially because if I had it badly wrong, I would embarrass myself. But, I googled a bit, and didn't find the analogy made elsewhere, so I don't have confirmation from the REST experts.

I have 2nd generation iPod nano (not that the version matters), and as I navigate around the interface, I see something which in lots of places seem to be RESTful design. Firstly it seems to have a uniform interface. Furthermore, as I go through 'music->artists->elvis', etc ... I am navigating links. This is "connectedness" as described in RESTful Web Services. Actually, I would like to see more from the Pod in this direction - for example, for the song I am currently listening to, it would be nice to see how this is linked into which playlist, genre, etc. This would be going in the linked data direction. Furthermore, I believe I see a very nice example of the mysterious hypermedia as the engine of application state, in, for example, the stopwatch function of the ipod.

Hopefully, I am not too far off with this analogy. I find a lot of inspiration for the design of the Grid as a Web application from my MP3 player - i.e. I find it quite useful to think in terms of "how this would be done on the ipod", when thinking about REST.

(?)