ChattyHome Blog

Progress

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:07:29 +0100

I rigged stairs lighting and connected it to 12V power adapter. This is connected to power through LightwaveRF switch. I got API from the good folks at JSJS and I must say it’s a pleasure to work with both. I had some fun with the very, very old, pre Best MTG App iPhone client and revamped it a little bit. The UI is already better than the official one, hehe, as it has Favourites ;)

Back from the dead

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:48:30 +0100

Yesterday was a good day, I started working on Chattyhome again. It was long due, the system deteriorated to a point of almost complete malfunction, for the last few days I had to actually switch the lights on and off manually in the fishtank. I plan to completely rewrite the core of the system, ditch HTTP in favour of UDP and get rid of most of the SQL. UDP seems fun and it was really easy to get the basic communication working.

monthly progress update

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 02:32:15 +0000

Very little progress was achieved this month, mostly due to the fact that we moved again, this time to Malaysia. I was opening the XCode from time to time and did some little lazy programming, polishing the code here and there, but nothing worth reporting was accomplished.

monthly progress update

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:39:50 +0100

This month I was rather lazy but managed to make some progress anyway:

Finished the HTTP interface between the Server and the clients, together with simple authentication. Mac client can now work not only on the LAN with direct SQL connection, but also from anyplace in the world connected to the internet. Tested from Poland so far ;)

Pictures can be stored on the server, cached on the Mac client and displayed in the Tree Location view. Just a gimmick but could be useful, and the same piece of code is used to handle pictures on the Overview tab.

Added Scenarios for Timers. Now with one click you can enable / disable part of schedule, i.e. switch the guest bedroom on or switch the whole house (but the fishtank) off when you’re away for the weekend.

Moved away from the old web-based log displayed in a WebView and implemented it in a proper NSTableView, finally.

New System Connector, this is a second one after Arduino Connector. It’s not a hardware driver this time, but rather a virtual one which can talk to other Mac software. It can Growl, speak, send Skype messages and SMS, announce weather for the day (courtesy of Weather.com), execute SQL scripts (which themselves can use System Connector to execute Actions...), and last but not least execute Apple Script (i.e. you can run your iTunes from ChattyHome). The Apple Script command alone can achieve majority of the other commands which I implemented in the System Connector, but I have them anyway and will probably continue to add new ones for the sake of simplicity of the implementation.

Due to the major rewrite of the interface and the Overview tab the web client is now outdated and broken so I temporarily took it offline. With the Mac client and iPhone client being able to work over HTTP the web client is kind of superfluous anyway, but then my day job laptop is a bloody Dell and also I appreciate that many people would want to be able to access the system from a PC, so getting the web client fixed is pretty high on my TODO list.

a proper iPhone client

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 09:59:25 +0100

I had a few semi-successful attempts at creating something for the iPhone, but it was basically just hacking and hardcoding into some example projects from Apple. A few days ago I finally got my head round the idea of programming interfaces in iOS and boy, what a blast it is! In a way it is so much cooler than programming desktop apps, the way the API works makes it so natural to close all the holes and polish the every bit of it so it is as perfect as possible. I think it is not too bad that I waited for such a long time to finally do it, it is so much easier when you’re already familiar with the Cocoa programming. You can also immediately notice small little differences and improvements in the API design that iOS SDK has over Cocoa, but mostly it is the same good old stuff. It also helped that my main engine and client - server interfaces are quite mature now, and I could focus on doing the user interface rather than fighting the nitty gritty internals. And BTW, the new iPhone 4’s screen just blows everything I’ve seen out of the water, it truly is magical (As in, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic).
Anyways, the client at the moment will let you browse through the tree (Locations / Actions / Probes / Paths) and will display detailed information per node type, and you can add Actions to Favourites and Probes to Overview for quick access. Nothing too exciting yet, but it was just a few days and it’s all working nicely and in a way it is more robust than the same functions accessed from the Mac client. I remember the Apple keynote on which they released the iPhone APIs and were showing off various apps created in supposedly 2 weeks - and I can now believe they were not lying (but I still bet that most of the code was reused from existing apps and those developers were experienced Cocoa guys).

Check the screenshots here.