The new VERA Dashboard preview (Android)!

melih · February 1, 2020, 12:51pm

When designing your UI to be “Responsive” ( Material Design Responsive web design - Wikipedia) designers use these “Grid” system.

Of course we want to make our responsive grid system as flexible as possible. So the two grid pictures above is the options we are thinking about.
then the question is which button or widget goes where…background etc.
Ability to place widget/butttons into grids .
Apart from where to place widgets/buttons, what else do you want to be able to modify/configure?
thank you for your feedback

cw-kid · February 1, 2020, 1:58pm

@melih

As for GUI design and layout of your Vera / Ezlo mobile app, what are your plans ?

I was kinda expecting a brand new app built from the ground up, however it looks like we will be getting the original Vera mobile app with dashboard functions added on top ?

Imperihome have a gallery page here with some images of some of their customers dashboards.

ActionTiles for SmartThings have a thread here with user images of their panels.

Google images of Fibaro control app here

Or take a look at what the big boys are doing with their control apps like, Crestron, AMX, Control4, Savant, RTI etc

Some random images I like for the styling, must have a dark theme mode in your app.

Crestron

Fibaro

TIS Control

DemoPad

RTI

Obviously most of these systems are very expensive professionally installed systems and their tablet control apps have design studio software so you can design your own dashboard GUI’s.

I’m never expecting Vera to be to this standard, but if you can give us a half decent app like Imperihome, where we can create our own basic dashboard pages then I’d be happy enough.

What are your expectations for your mobile control app ???

cw-kid · February 1, 2020, 2:07pm

I’ve OK with a grid layout system as long as we have plenty of options for the different page layouts we can choose from.

Imperihome also uses this type of grid page system as I already mentioned, but the number of different grid page layouts you can choose from is not enough and I often find for the number of buttons / widgets I want on a particular dashboard page I am creating, there isn’t a matching grid layout I can choose.

cw-kid · February 1, 2020, 2:08pm

No idea sorry. Look at their community site

cw-kid · February 1, 2020, 2:09pm

As much as possible !

melih · February 1, 2020, 2:27pm

To answer your question re: what we are doing
In order to speed up our development we moved to “NativeScript” development vs just IOS/Android…
A new team was established and have been working on creating a brand new app for our users. One of our OEM customers are going to be first to receive it in February. Once we test and all works and we have achieved full feature parity with our other apps, we will release it to our forums as beta.
of course this is just a brand new app based on nativescript that we can develop fast for you guys…but that’s only half the story…Creating customizable dashboard is handled as a separate initiative in the company at the moment. We have some funky ideas about the meaning of a dashboard and how the future of dashboard should operate…can’t reveal those here at the moment…I personally can’t wait to start using those dashboards as it will address many of my needs in my own personal home!

cw-kid · February 1, 2020, 2:35pm

Least in Imperihome app it gives us options to add some “smart” composite widgets as I already described above and I did some screen shots of all the different types of widgets you can add your dashboard pages in Imperihome.

One thing that is important to me is the Logitech Harmony plugin for Vera, its a very powerful 3rd party plugin that allows us to control our Harmony universal remotes from Vera.

Mainly starting Harmony activities at the moment to turn on the TV or a Games Console or a Fire TV stick or ChromeCast device or what ever. You can also have buttons for sending individual device commands to a particular AV device, for example a GUIDE button or a MENU button or a Play / Pause button etc.

However there is a HTTP API inbuilt in to the Harmony plugin for Vera, so we can send any http command to Vera and the Harmony plugin to control any AV device that is on our Harmony hub.

I would love to be able to have a dashboard page that is not constrained by a predefined grid layout and one where I can place buttons anywhere on the dashboard page I want and to be able to resize those buttons and add text labels on to the buttons.

And if I can then make those buttons to send HTTP POST commands to Vera (or any other IP controlled device), then I could effectively create remote control pages for my Audio Visual devices, similar to the Crestron or DemoPad images above.

Being able to add buttons that send HTTP POST commands not only to the Vera controller but also to be able to send them to any other IP device on the LAN that supports control of that device via IP is very important.

This is the widget for sending HTTP POST or GET commands from Imperihome app.

You must be able to do this in the new Vera mobile app !

All of these buttons in my Imperihome app are sending different HTTP POST commands to the Logitech Harmony plugin for Vera and its API, that then in turn controls the Harmony hub and my Audio Visual devices.

Some buttons to send channel numbers to my TV for channel favourites

Some buttons for commands for my Denon AVR amplifier.

These were experimental webpages “Panels” created in the ALTUI for Vera, to create a remote control for my TV and my Kodi media center within Imperihome.

I used an Imperihome widget to embed an ALTUI Panel webpage and each of the buttons are sending HTTP commands to the Harmony plugin for Vera, its a bit hacky and doesn’t look great, but it was the only way I could create a remote control page layout and add it in to the Imperihome app.

cw-kid · February 1, 2020, 3:00pm

I’m very happy to hear you are developing a brand new app !

I was getting concerned because all I have seen so far on the forums is what looked to be the old Vera mobile app and some new single dashboard page tacked on to it.

melih · February 1, 2020, 3:30pm

Yes, we are developing a new app…
we have an initiative to create “customizable dashboards”
The Vera Mobile team (what you call Old ) continues to improve that code as well…
So we are trying to fire in all cylinders! But it does take time

cw-kid · February 1, 2020, 7:58pm

I forgot to post this screen shot. I have a Logitech Harmony hub in each room with a TV.

Imperihome app has basic Harmony integration for adding Harmony activity buttons for turning on / off your activities.

I would think most people who are the types buying Vera hubs will be using Harmony hubs or Broadlink RM Pro hubs for controlling their audio visual equipment.

I’d also like to see rstp support for adding cctv camera streams in to the Vera mobile app.

Don’t necessarily need to add cams to the Ui8 Web GUI of the Vera controller, but being able to view cams in the mobile app is required.