I completely overhauled my interface (previously XPronto SCUBA Edition) in an attempt to make the remote easier for my wife to use.
I've modeled my Home/Splash screen after the HTC Hero phone with a large digital clock and current weather conditions. You can go to the full 5-day forecast (located in a different activity) by pressing on the weather icon area.
The main activities page incorporates large icons to quickly and easily navigate to the device you wish to control. I have incorporated both device and state tracking. This allows you to navigate to settings (audio and video) or weather sections and quickly return to your current device. The device state tracking will keep track of witch inputs you are using for both the display and receiver. If you navigate to either the display input section of receiver input section, a blue light will be displayed on the input button for your current device.
The animation for the 'Making system adjustments' and 'Shutting the system down' sections turned out quite nicely. There is both a blue ball that travels from the remote icon to the screen as well as a fuzzy white pulse that travels along the progress bar as commands are being sent - similar to the VISTA progress bar effect. However, no ProntoScript was required... mostly because I currently don't know the language that well yet. I merely created a new sending icon with a total of 8 segments and each segment contains two different graphical elements. After that, it required some creative layering/graphic ordering to create the desired effect as I did not want the pulse to travel beyond the color segment of the progress bar.
The weather module, which use the xml.weather.com feed and not the xoap.weather.com feed (which was discontinued on November 15, 2011), still works to this day! It is a customized version of Paul Spee's module with a lot of extra info and functionality. It will display the five day forecast with options to see more detail (wind speed, UV index, etc as well as the phase of the moon), switch between F and C on the fly and display either the day forecast or night forecast.
This project is still a work in progress! Not sure when I will get the chance in the next while to finish things up as I have a four month old girl now and a 2˝ year old boy... my free time has evaporated.
Items to complete:
- Various icons for the phases of the moon.
- New weather icons (although at the bottom of my list as this will take a lot of time).
- New icons for Contacts, Help & Support, Pictures in the ‘Other’ page in the Activity Selection area. As well as for Custom Installer, Programmer and Remote Settings in the ‘Setup’ page in the Activity Selection area. These are currently ones found on the internet (All other icons, buttons, etc I created from scratch in Photoshop).
- Finish off the TV station icons in the Satellite TV Stations section (some are still based on older design I made.
- Weather module programming – trying to get multiple weather warnings to scroll across the screen... currently only grabbing the first warning. Also, hoping to store the day's high temp in order to retrieve that info after 2:00pm... when it is no longer available from The Weather Channel. Have not had the chance to continue this work. Feel free to give it a try and re-post the module and/or code to get this to work.
Note: this system and all elements contained therein (including graphics) are free for personal use only. Absolutely no commercial use is permitted without my consent.
