Native Android app (auto-gen based)

[Dean Roddey]

Is there anything planned for this app that the existing android client cannot do? I guess that means web widgets, etc?

There isn't any currently, but there could be if the room configuration stuff ended up requiring any. And of course being a native app it can provide the native type scrolling and such.

Ultimately, if I can push everyone forward on the RIVA front in the ways I've outlined, this type of program could become somewhat redundant in a way, since that would also allow for native scrolling and web browsers and such. But, given that we aren't charging for it, it won't matter if it ultimately is superseded by a new RIVA system.

But still, yeh, if I felt we could get the train moving in the direction of a new RIVA system right now, I'd probably put my efforts into that and work on an Android client for that. Because it would have most of the advantages of this program, and the auto-generated templates would also run under it without the current RIVA system limitations.

But, OTOH, this can be done relatively quickly, it's of a reasonable size to serve as my initiation into Android development, and it'll probably always be more light weight than a RIVA client by a considerable margin, which might have benefits.

[Dean Roddey]

I think you are missing the boat with not charging for the application.

I can't see how it would be worth it. At $20, if having it be part of the system allowed us to sell a single Gold license that we wouldn't have sold otherwise, that would be equivalent to almost 45 $20 licenses. It's just not an amount of money that's worth dealing with the hassles of individual licenses. This isn't the type of market where selling a low priced product works. If a million people were going to purchase this app, it might make sense, but sadly that's not going to happen.

[DaveB]

You do not need licensing in this model. Only make it available via the web store including updates. Charge for the initial download on a device and there would be no need to manually track the purchase. The web store auto-tracks the device ID. If someone changes devices, they must purchase a new copy, like all the other applications out there. I just do not think that it is that difficult.

[Dean Roddey]

Actually, we are probably going to open source the code so it wouldn't really do much good to license it. We just don't see this as a useful source of income that would remotely outweigh the benefits of making it available and throwing the code out there.

The functionality is strategic to us, but the code isn't in this case, a apposed to our C++ code. If, by putting it out there, we encourage someone else to create an even better one, to use the software design ideas to create a better or new RIVA or XML GW based client on another platform, or to just buy CQC, the payoff would be orders of magnitude greater than charging $20 a pop for a low volume product.

[Dean Roddey]

I did a little more customization on the lighting screen. Actually I tried various things that sucked, and wasted a lot of time in the process, and ultimately went with something fairly simple. I updated the first post with the updated screen cap.

[pasha]

is it available for trial/download yet?

[Dean Roddey]

It's not far enough along yet. I'll put it up soon, with just the basic functionality I'll have done at that point, for people to play around with. I'm working on the weather now, so that will give me lights and weather as functions for folks to play with.

[beelzerob]

Let me know if I can help at all with this, Dean. I'm definitely interested in supporting as well as using.

[Dean Roddey]

I'll probably put up a first cut of the code here soon. In the process of working on the weather stuff I decided to go back and do another cut at the field polling/management plumbing to simplify it more.

[Dean Roddey]

I've been having a horrible time with Eclipse/ADT. It will very easily get into a 100% CPU usage freakout when using the layout editor. I've seen others complaining of the same thing, but none of them seem to be in the last year or so, though I didn't do an exhaustive search. Even when not completely freaking out, it regularly does large jumps in the CPU which make it very spongey to work with. Eventually, usually when setting the id on something I've just added, it goes into lah-lah land and I have to kill Eclipse (and lose anything I hadn't saved.)