A friend of mine asked if I could toggle the image within Indigo to make the control page look like the Savant. That got me inspired, and turned out to be quite simple. I used a tripod to take pictures of each room with the lights off and on. Then used Photoshop to cut out the lights from the on picture, and saved the same image as a transparant image to represent the off state. This way it works sort of like an image map.

Anyway, the two images below show the results and would make any Savant owner jealous.

PS: on the new version of Indigo, it will be cool if we could just select an option to automatically create a rectangular image map from the selected image.

Haseen

Here is my other control page for the whole house. I do have couple of challenges with this one that I need to iron out. The standard buttons either toggle the on/off state of a single switch or toggle the group scene state when I have multi-way switches and remote switches. These all work fine.

My first challenge is with the pop-up UI, currently I have them tied to the power buttons -- the single switches work fine, but I am not able to set the levels on the multi-way switches. I was hoping to set the levels with the pop-up UI then use a server action to set the levels. But it looks like the server actions execute before the client actions. Is there a way to launch the UI through code in the server action? Any other ideas?

The second issue is a bit of nitpicking -- I added my own images of the Venstar thermostats (Venstar.png and Venstar+on.png), and even display the temperature on the display -- pretty cool! I decided to take advantage of the pop-up UI to change the actual settings. In the on state the light is green and that image loads properly. I am able to turn the thermostats off and change all the settings, but the off state image never loads. That image has a red light. Any suggestions?

Also, does anyone have good images to indicate this is a pop-up UI or some sort of a slider image? I would like to replace the power buttons with something a bit more intuitive.

Thanks.

Haseen

haseenalam wrote:My first challenge is with the pop-up UI, currently I have them tied to the power buttons -- the single switches work fine, but I am not able to set the levels on the multi-way switches. I was hoping to set the levels with the pop-up UI then use a server action to set the levels. But it looks like the server actions execute before the client actions. Is there a way to launch the UI through code in the server action? Any other ideas?

Check out the multi-way wiki article for various ideas on how to keep them in sync.

haseenalam wrote:The second issue is a bit of nitpicking -- I added my own images of the Venstar thermostats (Venstar.png and Venstar+on.png), and even display the temperature on the display -- pretty cool! I decided to take advantage of the pop-up UI to change the actual settings. In the on state the light is green and that image loads properly. I am able to turn the thermostats off and change all the settings, but the off state image never loads. That image has a red light. Any suggestions?

What do you have selected as the state value in the Control Page page element definition? If you select "Current Mode" then the possible values are: "all off", "cool on", "heat on", and "auto on" and you'll have to do custom images for each.

If you just want to show whether the thermostat is off or in one of the on states, then you'd select "Mode is Off (true or false)" and name your images "Venstar.png" for the ON image and "Venstar+true.png" for the OFF image.

Thanks Jay. Finally I was able to take the time to make the necessary tweaks -- everything is working now. The article was also helpful in resolving the multi-way switch issue. I just didn't get it the first time that the hardwired multi-way switches can also be treated as two separate switch and I can sync them through a trigger.

Haseen

Nicoleto..really nice work on the interfaces. I assume we're looking at control pages and was wondering how you were able to display the Squeezebox artwork or play certain playlists
from a control page?

Thanks,

Carl

Great looking pages. Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere. Is there a way to remove the header and the back button from the top control pages in indigo touch?

Kind-of but currently there is an issue with it. See this forum thread for the details.

pwfletcher wrote:I finally got around to coding a new control page for my iPad. The page is in its early stages of development and will evolve as I use it, but here is a pic of where I am heading. Home realtime energy monitoring is via T.E.D. (The Energy Detective).

How are you controlling TV functions [volume, input, channels...] from an iPad? Aren't those IR commands?

I'll discuss with Matt to see what his thoughts are about copyright issues - maybe he's more comfortable with it. If so, we'll consider adding them in 5.0.

I'm gonna take a wild stab and say that you are not comfortable putting these in as opposed to you just forgot. Am I right?

Still haven't made the final decision - we've been extremely busy with getting Indigo 5 done, shipped, and we've had a TON of support to do since the release. To do those images right so that they're generally reusable is quite time consuming and frankly they are pretty low on the priority list.

I tried doing the Xcode route, but the learning curve is too steep for my available time. I DID however, find a very cool app for iPad that is a UI builder. While not the simplest to use either, I think it is much much easier to use than Xcode. The app is called Blueprint and the developers are Groosoft. They have both a lite (free) version and a full version that is 19.99. As far as I can tell so far, I don't really have a need for the full version... but if I'm using it a lot in the future, I might pick up the full version to help support.

I have gone with a pretty heavily iOS influenced control page for my iPhone and this has helped make it more polished and professional looking.

jay (support) wrote:

hamw wrote:Wow, that looks great. Is it possible to add your buttons to the indigo control page pulldown button menu?

I'm afraid that adding them might be in violation of Apple copyrights - it's unclear. And being unclear is enough for me to avoid it. As I said above, creating the buttons isn't that hard - just install Xcode, use Interface Builder to create the buttons, and take a screen shot. The only adjusting you have to do is around the corners. It's time consuming, but not hard.

I'll discuss with Matt to see what his thoughts are about copyright issues - maybe he's more comfortable with it. If so, we'll consider adding them in 5.0.

FYI, the images were added to the last Indigo release.

I saw.... but stuff that is more custom related, like house mode and other UI elements (sliders, buttons etc) are easy to create in there as well.

Was just a general reply to those on the thread who had previously asked if we were going to include them...

jay (support) wrote:

nexx wrote:Jay,

out of curiosity, what do you use for as an amplifier attached between the airport express and the speakers?

I'm just using an old Pioneer (~20 yrs) amp as my whole house amp (attached to a speaker distribution system) although it's starting to sound crackly so it's probably time to replace it.

Is the receiver ALWAYS ON or are you using an ApplianceLinc to power it ON when you want music?