I have been playing with the Vera iPhone interface, while it is nice I think it would be nicer if it was a native application. Whats everyone thoughts on this?
I don’t have an iPhone, but I’ve started working on a native app for my G1. At it’s current state it’s far from perfect, but it works and I think it’s definitely the way to go… it just feels and responds so much better.
I agree.
This past week we’ve done a major overhaul of the reporting of zwave device status. see: http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/ZWave_Status
So now the UI can show live, in real time, when a job is active, and when it succeeds/fails, and an explanation of the reason. We’ve got a new firmware with this and a new UI coming out soon. So now, when you choose a scene that controls, say 5 lights, you can display a ‘gear working’ animation next to the 5 lights while they’re being controlled, and it can change to to a green check or a red alert, with a popup explaining what went wrong and how to fix it. The goal is a much more interactive UI experience.
Our big frustration with iPhone is that we’ve an outside GUI expert who is looking to do a completely new UI in flex that’s very graphical and animated. But, it seems that Apple has blocked the use of Flex, Flash or any other tool like this because it would allow people to produce web-based applets, and Apple doesn’t want this; they want only apps that are offered on the Apple AppStore so they can get a cut. But this means we have to essentially do the UI twice: once in flex/flash or any of the other similar platforms to run on the web, google android, windows mobile phones, etc., and then a native Apple objective C (which can’t re-use the code) just for iPhone. We’re in a real quandary over this because the iPhone is so popular and makes a great remote, but it’s a maintainability issue to have 2 separate code bases that do essentially the same thing and both sets of code need to be updated in parallel. We’re still trying to find a solution that would let us deploy a single UI that works on iPhone and on the other phones too.
Screw iphone - let’s concentrate on Blackberry Storm 