native scroll for android client

[pasha]

Guys,

just want to throw an idea...

Is it possible to bring into RIVA or some kind of hybrid client that will have feel and look of the way touch interfaces are design today. What I mean it you have filedlist or media repository is to have ability to scroll though it w/o need of next/prev buttons. I mean even if you have nice interface template set it's so outdated comparing to all apps for Android and iOS

-p

[Dean Roddey]

It's not possible with the RIVA system as it is today. It would really require something more native I think.

[pasha]

how about providing special objects like RIVA_field browser
which will send whole list, then processed on RIVA client???

[Dean Roddey]

That would require a complete re-write of these clients. They wouldn't really be thin RIVA clients anymore, they'd be native, thick clients, and would have to deal with running actions and all of the complexity that entails, and managing the visual state of widgets, i.e. they'd end up trying to recreate the IV, which is both large itself and based on a far larger core of code to handle all of the tens of thousands of details involved.

So it's pretty much RIVA or not RIVA. If not RIVA, then it's going to be a massive effort.

[pasha]

Dean,

here is my $.02 as a customer...

You have great backend, by far better then many competitors, and you keep beefing up with more and more, however frontend in my opinion sucks!

CQC is software only solution, with that in mind, you as owner have think what hardware it should be running on in order for it to be marketable. If you look into industry trend, there is not many Windows tablets on the market now or coming anytime soon(and they all very heavy and battery lasts for only 2-3 hours), when Android and iOS devices probably taking 95% if not more of all tablets manufactured today, yet there is no native client for them.
1) RIVA for Android is somewhat unusable, as you have to kill it every time after device went to sleep
2) iOS RIVA client is stable, however from my take is way to slow.

and because they "lite RIVA" overall navigation and user experience is not on the par with the way touch interface should be today.

with all of that being said I think you should invest more time into frontend overhaul, as you can't have great software which runs w/o hardware.

-p

[wuench]

Animation is definitely something that would add some pizaz to CQC screens. The client would need to handle the animation it would be too slow to try to send it across these high latency links, but couldn't you just send the begin and end state and attach a transition (i.e. slide left). Then the client could optionally implement that transition. I would think IOS and Android (and probably future tablets) can handle a standard set of transitions. Just transitions when changing overlays or displaying popups (some of which you already have) would probably make people happy.

I think the way IOS handles it could be overlayed into RIVA. Just create "begin transition", "end transition" commands. Then the client could elect to support those, collect all the changes between the two commands and execute the transition when done. Or it could ignore the transition commands and display the changes in real time as it does now.

[pasha]

and 1 more thing....

there is should be method to invoke local input keyboard. For example if you doing search it should use local keyboard then pass whole string back to cqc

same for password field (arm/disarm security)

-p

[Dean Roddey]

with all of that being said I think you should invest more time into frontend overhaul, as you can't have great software which runs w/o hardware.

-p

We understand that certainly. But until we can afford to hire a team of developers, it's just not doable. The amount of functionality in the IV is huge. Porting it to another platform would be a year's work, even for someone who was very knowledgeable about those platforms, their OSes and their development tools and languages. For me to do it, knowing nothing about them, would be even longer than that and even then only if I basically stopped developing the product otherwise.

And of course if I did do it, I couldn't afford to do it for just one platform, I'd have to make it able to support Windows, iOS and Android, and that would make it an even more enormous project. At best it could only be a fairly simple client, and then of course what would have been the point since it wouldn't remotely compete with the power of the current IV and would be a huge step downwards.

So we are caught somewhat between a rock and a hard place on this front.

[pasha]

Dean,

It’s not accurate... I think most of the functionality can achieve using riva with some sort of extension, or some sort of hybrid client. if you will provide overlays as you do today with dimension and position of the screen where they have to fit, while actual overlay larger than your overlay window, client can take care of animation.

html5 is other option, and will not require much from the client side.

-p

[Dean Roddey]

If all you are talking about is being able to scroll by dragging with the finger, then yeh, that could be added to the RIVA system since it could be implemented on the Windows side as well and the RIVA client would just send those types of input commands like it currently does press/release commands.

That wouldn't mean it wouldn't still be page oriented necessarily, since doing otherwise would require a significant change in how the RIVA clients work. But it could allow for dragging scrolls.