iPhone/iPod Touch Orbiter?

[tschak909]

I sure wish you would have worked with us on this...

*hmm*

-Thom

[caiman]

Hi Thom,

I sure wish you would have worked with us on this...

I sure did try. Asked for help on the IRC channel (to get the list of scenarios via DCE protocol) and chatted with you about this. Didn't really get the warm welcome I expected for someone who does his best to contribute.

In any case, I coded this for my own use (and it's really handy). I hope others will find it useful.

I am eager to work with anyone that is motivated to move this forward. The webservice in particular is just a hack, and would benefit from the team's combined experience to be more robust and feature rich.

And yes, a full fledged orbiter would be nice to have, specially on ipad, and it will take more than little me to code it

[davegravy]

I sure wish you would have worked with us on this...

I sure did try. Asked for help on the IRC channel (to get the list of scenarios via DCE protocol) and chatted with you about this. Didn't really get the warm welcome I expected for someone who does his best to contribute.

Frustrated to read this, especially since this is such a high-demand feature which it's been very difficult to find willing contributors for.

I realize the devs are insanely busy, but they're probably going to stay that way unless those that want to help are given the assistance they need.

[dlewis]

I'd have to disagree with the lack of help. People have asked for the source code in order to provide support and caiman has not responded to those posts.

[los93sol]

Caiman: I have to disagree with you.  You had plenty of opportunity for support that you did not accept, on the previous page of this thread I asked twice for you to post your code so I could assist.

I've been working with the "core developers" for several months now and have always been, at the very least, pointed in the right direction so that I could find the answer I was searching for.

Need to check my references for contributions: worked with Thom on VistaICM, HAI Omni Series automation panels, Email/SMS, dozens of wiki edits and, assisting members on the boards here.

I don't really care what you do, but coming out rogue like this, making claims that you haven't gotten support from the developers here is quite frustrating when I, while not a core developer, offered to help.  Not only that, iOrbiter has incorporated the same functionality as your application for quite awhile and is free.  It really comes off as a slap in the face to the spirit of a community driven project for new prospective developers to introduce themselves in this manner.

Hi Thom,

I sure wish you would have worked with us on this...

I sure did try. Asked for help on the IRC channel (to get the list of scenarios via DCE protocol) and chatted with you about this. Didn't really get the warm welcome I expected for someone who does his best to contribute.

In any case, I coded this for my own use (and it's really handy). I hope others will find it useful.

I am eager to work with anyone that is motivated to move this forward. The webservice in particular is just a hack, and would benefit from the team's combined experience to be more robust and feature rich.

And yes, a full fledged orbiter would be nice to have, specially on ipad, and it will take more than little me to code it

[MANDINGO]

I'd have to disagree with the lack of help. People have asked for the source code in order to provide support and caiman has not responded to those posts.

I have to agree with dlewis on this,  if help is what your after and its for the good of the whole project every and any one in the IRC will try to help you as much as they can including myself, now on another issue i find this to be very UPSETTING "At the moment, the app is in a functioning state (for the features mentioned above). It is however not yet available to the public. Expect it on the app store soon for a small fee. "   wow !!!!! This is not MICROSOFT and we are not here for a profit, but for the love of the project  ,  Think about the big picture and lets get LinuxMCE there one community step at a time...

Thanks

Mandingo

[caiman]

All,

I think we're on a wrong start here. I did not claim one cannot get help from the developers, not about the fact I didn't get help. Over the past years, I have received tons of help form the team, specially Hari and others. I did find Thom's comment disappointing though as he was the first person I talked to about this, and the same who almost completely discouraged me from getting started. Then to say I did not try to work together came as a surprise ;-)

This being over, I do appreciate all the offers for help on this thread. Please keep in mind that I have started real coding only about two weeks ago so there wasn't much code to share. Everything before was buying the SDK and learning from scratch how to use it through very basic little experiments. Yes, the multiple requests to share progress in the past few days gave me a push to get started, and here we are.

I am more than happy to share the code. What is the best place? A directory on CVS, or a separate hosting solution? I do not have experience with this, suggestions welcome.

Regarding the fact I intend to ask a few bucks for the app store version, my goal is only to recover some of the development costs. Anything beyond that goes to research against cancer. I fully support open and free software, yet wouldn't mind recovering for the initial SDK costs. I have tried myself to compensate for development efforts done by the LMCE team through some small gifts when I could. And let's face it, the very first message of this thread is about how much people would pay for an iPhone orbiter. This isn't one, but is a first step in the learning process.

I am sorry if anyone felt offended by my modest contribution, or how I introduced it. Now let's not spend so many cycles arguing and get constructive building together the best home automation system on the planet.

[chrisbirkinshaw]

I was hoping for something more fully fledged as the web service, ie. a full rails app with relevant models defined and a fully restful API. I am still really keen to do this. I have a reasonable knowledge of ruby and rails.

Unless anyone has objections I'll propose something and make a start with a project up on git hub.

Did anyone start modelling the lmce database in rails BTW?

Chris

[dlewis]

All good. I think we're all on the same page now...

Caiman, please create a trac ticket and upload your code. Please provide as much detail as possible around the code as well:

http://svn.linuxmce.org/trac.cgi/newticket

Everyone, please begin tracking your dev work on the new ticket Caiman will create. Thanks!

[caiman]

Caiman, please create a trac ticket and upload your code.

I have tried, trac seems to limit file upload size to 200k or so, the zipped project (without builds) is 590Kb. Shall I setup a svn on google code?

[tschak909]

Can you email it to me? I'll talk with hari and possy, and figure out how to proceed.

-Thom

[caiman]

Can you email it to me? I'll talk with hari and possy, and figure out how to proceed.

Hi Thom,

you have it in your email.

As a next step I'm thinking of adding support for scenarios. Let me know if you want to host on cvs, or if a separate hosting is preferable.

chrisbirkinshaw, great to hear you are attacking the challenge of building a web service. This will create a lot of new possibilities, and I'll be eager to use it in this app when it's available.

[Marie.O]

Re web service: hari started a rpc_plugin to provide web access to the innards of LinuxMCE. Maybe that could be a start?

[sonicwind]

What's the status for this? I'm in for $20 if the features are rich. In other words nothing like the web orbiter. I'm interested in working on one myself, a smart phone AJAXy solution that would work on the finger touch screens on the iPhone like devices. That would be more bang for the effort. No app store, no device specific, except for possibly what's necessary for streaming. By that's for a media center not an orbiter.   

[caiman]

Re web service: hari started a rpc_plugin to provide web access to the innards of LinuxMCE. Maybe that could be a start?

That would be great indeed. A quick search on wiki and the forums didn't give results. Any pointers to this? I'd be happy to adapt my code to work with this plugin. I have also tested the rails version by chrisbirkinshaw: http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=9740.0

Desired features for a webservice in this particular use case would be:
- authentication
- possibility to return only the data needed, in a very lean format to ensure speedy response even on 3G links

By the way, after chatting with Thom offline, the source code for LmceRemote is now available on googlecode for now. You can find the link and more infos on the wiki page: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/LmceRemote
If anyone feels like testing it, feedback welcome (and you can use the tracker on googlecode to report issues).

I have also added some preliminary info on how to use the application remotely.