GoogleTV Integration

Apps & Remote Access Unmaintained
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I started back on working on getting GoogleTV integration implemented. The current tablet interface proved to be not user friendly when using a remote or the d-pad on the revue keyboard. I was also having issues with getting the control to be selectable and highlighted in the list. I did some thinking and I decided to rework the interface to make it more manageable. Here is an early preview of what it will look like. There is a lot of work that needs to be done. But I wanted to give you an idea of where I am headed.

For Scenes and Devices, there will be a 3 panel interface, consisting of rooms, list of devices/scenes and the control panel. The control will house the controls and options for the devices. Here is the snap shot. Let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas.

  • Garrett
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So far it looks good. I like the 3 panel concept.

I really appreciate you reworking this for the GoogleTV, this is going to be one of my main ways of interacting with Vera (the other being AutHomation on my android tablet!).

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Garrett,
One of the things that would be useful is to look at each of the UI elements and consider the impact if they were removed.

ie. “Would you really miss X if it was removed from the UI”

and then to ensure that everything else is readily navigable via the DPad/Arrow keys. This will help with control of the UI without the “entire keyboard” and/or without having to switch modes (Keyboard/Mouse) in the iPhone/Android UI GoogleTV Controllers.

With this in mind, I’d remove the sort-order, and region-based preferences/filters and push them all into some sort of centralized preference pane. For me, I tend to set these once, and never look at them again (YMMV).

This will greatly simplify the focus-management, since there will be less components on the screen to DPad through.

ie. How many DPad actions are required to Navigate around for common actions.

I also think that merging Scenes and Devices would be reasonable, perhaps moved to a “Filter” option as to what should be displayed. Taking that the next step, instead of:
Scenes
Devices
Favorites

these could be an extensible list of Meta-data based filter criteria, with a set of defaults like:

Scenes (type="scene")
Devices (type="device")
Favorites (favorite="true")

but then let us do more compound ones like:

Lighting (type="device", deviceType="lights")
Kitchen Lighting (deviceType="lights", room="Kitchen")

so the left-nav would be totally customizable, initially using a simple extension of the existing Filter dialog that you have (but moved “up” in it’s logical placement)

Anyhow, longer term stuff, but more for ideas.

I also think you can nuke the Search option.

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I have a lot of work ahead of me. I do plan on moving the sorting options out of the way and freeing up the title bar area (did not get to that yet). The picture above is just to show the 3 pane concept). I do need to think of the best approach for this though.

With the way the devices and scenes get populated into the database (after I did the rewrite), I can incorporate both scenes and devices into one. That idea I will have to think about as it will require me to rewrite a good portion of the UI code. I also wanted to make an option to not show rooms that do not have anything in them. I wrote some code for this and it worked, but did not look good when populated in the list. The list view was generated weird. I’ll have to put this back on the thinking board.

I was hoping to write code over the next few days until my hardwood floors came in. I will be installing them into my whole first floor for the next few days. Hopefully I can get started back into writing code next week and try and get something usable by the end of the year.

  • Garrett
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Googletv has a dedicated search button the the keyboard you could probably remove the UI element. But I really like being able to search for devices.

I now change channels on my tv mostly by search (“search”->“cbs”->“ok”). I probably will end up interacting with AutHomation the same way if possible.

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If it can be integrated with the Global search function then mores-the-better. I’m not sure if they let people hook into that though.

To me, the 10ft UI is a fail when the Keyboard pops up… at least for the scale of home control, since it often can be slower than an efficient UI layout and [non-mouse] navigation (DPad, Hotkeys etc, etc), at least from breaking the navigational flow of the app…

A “companion” app, that works hand-in-hand with the TV-based one, might be an interesting [and eventual] evolution.

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For anyone that is interested. I released a test build that includes most of the integration for GoogleTV. This has a revamped UI. Please see this thread for details:

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,8818.0.html

If you have a googletv box and willing to test this build out, it would be much appreciated and feedback is welcome.

  • Garrett

Post is worthless with out some screen shots :slight_smile:

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And another…

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Ill check it out…tks

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Just loaded it on my Revue and it works great. Easy set up and Favorites is a nice addition to get to most used Scenes and Devices easily. Makes the $90 I paid for the Revue even more worth it now.

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Lol I paid the full price when it first came out with such high expectations!
Still holding out hope for it and some nice things it does for me…