No offense intended to any of those who have developed third-party remote apps for iOS, but I haven’t been very satisfied with the look and feel, nor the overall user experience with these apps.
I’m a User Experience Engineer, so I have a strong desire to build applications that not only look great, but are easy and efficient to use. However, I don’t have programming skills.
What I would like to do is team up with someone who does have programming skills and build something AWESOME.
Could be working with the developers of an existing app, or it could be building a new one from the ground up. Any takers?
Not to avoid fully-answering your question, but there are really only 3 key things I see, and everything else comes together as part of these tenets:
Simplicity - While many here seem to appreciate the “extreme customizability” of some of the other available apps, I think it’s more important to focus on doing things in a simple, efficient way. I want something my wife can pick up and use, but that I (being a tech geek) can enjoy as well.
Aesthetically pleasing - Again, no offense to those who have built apps already, but I want one that feels “polished”. This should come as a side effect of #1, but it’s still important to me. I want something I can potentially put on an old iPod Touch and mount on the wall and not be concerned that it looks like an iPod Touch mounted on the wall with an app running on it.
User-validated - Being a UX Engineer, I’m passionate about making things usable not only by me but by anyone else who might pick it up. That means putting designs in front of real users early and often. This goes back to #1 as well, as usability testing should be done with both tech-savvy users and users like my wife.
Just to follow up on what I’ve said about other apps. I really like the direction I’ve seen AutHomationHD going. It’s fairly clean and intuitive, specifically in landscape mode.
I’d like to take that further and create something that’s a delight to use. Android or iOS actually make no difference to me, because as I mentioned I don’t have programming skills. Ideally if we build something awesome we could share it on both sides of the fence…
Why not just provide constructive feedback to AutHomationHD …
If it is going in the right direction, and a lot of folks think it is, why should we start another app ?
I agree with Richard… better to influence an existing product than start from scratch with a competing design. I recommend you create some sample screen shots of your vision and share them here for comments.
As I mentioned in the OP, I’m happy to work with an existing developer. In fact, I’d prefer it.
I currently don’t have any Android devices, so the ideal thing (for my own selfishness of course) wod be to work with an iOS developer, unless AutHomationHD’s dev is interested in going cross-platform (hint, hint)…
