Official 5.1 Beta Discussion Thread

[Dean Roddey]

[OK, 5.1 is out so I'm closing and un-sticking this one and creating a new one.]

This thread is for discussion of the 5.1 release and the betas leading up to it. Actual releases are in the first post of the Official 5.1 Beta Releases Thread. That thread isn't for discussion, so do that here.

5.1 is pretty simple, though it will be significant. Unlike 5.0 which was a monster, this one is considerably less intense, but it will be equally important to the future of the product and the company. There are two primary goals for 5.1:

• To create an HTML based client that works with the room configuration data, i.e. a fixed function client that understands the room configuration data and exposes it.
  
• The other is a skunk works project we aren't ready to discuss yet. It could be a major game changer, though there's some chance it could turn out to be infeasible for some reason. Some significant investigation has been done and some preliminary work has been started, but we need to get further along on it before we'll know. If it works as planned I think it will blow you guys away.
  

There are some other, smaller things to get done, and some other longer term (probably 5.2) things to sort of plan towards.

• We need to get the driver documentation ported over to the new HTML format
  
• It would be nice to expand the room configuration some more to support more functionality for less technical users (and in the new HTML client.)
  
• We obviously need a more full featured HTML client next, so of course in the work on the room config based client, we'll be thinking about how to move forward and gathering experience required to do that.
  

[Dean Roddey]

(Reserved)

[Dean Roddey]

(Reserved2)

[Dean Roddey]

A good bit of work has been done on the HTML client. I'm not too far from getting the first (limited) preview of it out there for folks to play with. It'll have support for weather and lights. That's enough to include all of the basic plumbing the program will have to ultimately have. The rest is more of the same pretty much. So once I get the lighting page finished I'll get it out there for folks to bang on some.

Nothing will have been done in terms of specifically making it adapt to different screen sizes. It is done in a fairly flexible way, and I've kept it pretty sparse, so that it should be able to adapt pretty well as is. But not probably to low resolution screens. That won't be a huge priority initially since there aren't that many such devices these days. I think that, as it is, it'll work on most commonly used devices that most folks really need a non-Windows client for.

It's very quick and responsive since it's Websockets based. It's all bespoke custom code, so it doesn't depend on a lot of large libraries. So it should download very quickly and be very light weight, despite being a 'thick' client, at least compared to the RIVA clients.

[Dean Roddey]

I spent most of the day setting up our new server but put in some time on some plumbing code for 'Project X'. Hopefully the new server setup goes well and I don't waste too much time on it. I really want to spend as much time as possible alternating between project x and the HTML client.

I'm hoping it goes swimmingly and I have it all worked out in a couple more days and we can maybe switch over next week. Of course, having said that, now it'll descend into a living hell or something.

[jkmonroe]

woo! 1st!

for reals, though, are we gonna get a hint on Project X?

[Dean Roddey]

Once I have something actually working I can demonstrate, I'll put something up for comment.

[bbrendon]

woo! 1st!

for reals, though, are we gonna get a hint on Project X?

One solution is to start crazy rumors until they get so out of control he has to spill the beans to stop the madness.

But he might just make something up to squelch the peons. Then we can document it as a conspiracy theory.

You can have the book and movie rights. lol

[Dean Roddey]

I will say that it doesn't involve either aliens or genetic manipulation, which narrows it down a good bit.

[Dean Roddey]

Since the new server is going pretty well, and I wanted to give folks time to play with the new forum software, I spent today on the HTML room config client. The big piece of plumbing yet done is the means to simulate a blocking call to the server. That can't actually be done in a Websockets client, so it has to be faked. So I worked on that today. I think I have basically in place what is required, but I'll have to test it out.

It essentially just lets a given application page say, until you see this response some back from the server, or this amount of time passes, just eat user input, so that the user can't do something else until the current operation is acked or errors out or times out. And of course while still dispatching other types of messages that need to be handled (like field changes.) That required moving all registration of click handlers down to the application class, so that it handles all clicks. If there is not a blocking operation underway it will pass the click on to the current page via a virtual method.

Once that's working, then the lighting page will be done and I can get a new drop up that lets you guys start playing with it.