CommandFusion: iPhone control with customizable interface

[aslamma]

Hey, I make the screen go black by just having a black background by going to a black page. Problem is the iPad (just like other LCD's) don't do great at black. They are closer to greyish, especially off angle. This is distracting when watching TV in a dark room.

Any other ideas of making the screen darker, blacker, or blank..but still be able to wake it by a simple tap on the screen? It's really unfortunate we have that slide to unlock, but wondering if there is a better way to deal with it.

[CommandFusion]

Unfortunately thats just the way the iPhone/iPad work, no way around it officially.

There is a guy who has a kiosk mode hack for iPod Touch working, where it disables the slide to unlock screen completely, and keeps wifi alive with the screen off, and turns the screen back on via accelerometer (no need to press any buttons and your back in control). He hasnt released it yet, but I have tested it and its awesome. Hopefully he can do the same for iPad once a jailbreak is released. Obviously it requires the device to be jailbroken.

[aslamma]

That sounds pretty awesome. I heard the ipad was jailbroke ( at least in concept on the first day).

P.S. The ipad min brightness is actually a good bit brighter than iPhone min brightness, which is not good for my use. Don't know why they did that though.

Hmmm I wonder if a privacy screen protector may do the trick as well.

[CommandFusion]

Not a fan of those screen protectors (I have one on my iPhone at the moment and it ends up ugly and dirty on the edges).
Apple even banned their sale in the apple store I believe.

[aslamma]

Jarrod,
Odd I have had these on my iPhones for years now and never witnessed any of this. Was it a high quality one? There is a big difference as I have had friends who tried the cheap ones and it was a mess.

My understanding is that Apple may have banned them for reasons such as high rate of return (not worth the hassle), many users having trouble getting them on properly (related to returns), and I even heard from an Apple employee some months ago that some idiots were making claims of it damaging the screen while the employees were putting them on. Anyway, last I read, the good ones had a high user satisfaction.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/TS504 ... TM3NTMyNDQ

Hard to beat 4.5 stars.

[CommandFusion]

Yeah maybe I have a cheapo one. No harm in trying it to reduce the brightness I guess.

[aslamma]

Another crack at it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGGdOPOh ... re=youtube

[CommandFusion]

Cool. I like what you did with the black screen, ingenious. Of course not saving any battery power, but serves a purpose.

Maybe we need to get a petition going to allow our app to have full control over screen brightness and power

[aslamma]

Would be nice if apple was less restrictive, but good products nonetheless.

I suppose the black screen would help to save power though right? Less light means less required power. The problem is it's not really black, it's more like a grey in reality...part of a problem with LCD technology and the fact that apple juiced up brightness for the iPad. It's better than nothing though. The other prob is that I have to return to a predefined screen instead of the previous one. Most of the time that is tv so not a deal breaker for me.

Jarrod, did you say you might try to do something like the air mouse app? That one works ok, but I don't like the layout and want to make a custom mousepad and even keyboard if possible.

[CommandFusion]

Hardly any power difference unfortunately. The backlight still has to be at the same level.

Set the page flip to "return" and it will go back to whatever page you were on before hand.

Custom keyboard is already possible, just make some buttons and assign them as keystrokes in eventghost.
Mouse trackpad is something we are adding eventually, not for a while yet though - few other features to work on first.

[aslamma]

Thanks, totally overlooked the possibility of a custom keyboard, duh!

Good to hear you are working the touchpad aspect, that will be great.

Do you know if it would be possible to run an app inside of an app? Seems pretty far fetched, but I would like to run the Apple remote app inside of iViewer. Doubt that is happening in the near future though.

Sorry for all the questions, but do you know of any good eventghost samples (or get a hold of any) that can do simple things like time and weather? I am kinda stuck at that point, although I have a 90% solution for my needs.

[CommandFusion]

Not possible to embed apps currently, and not with the iPhone OS 4.0 announcements either, so will be a long way off.

I dont know EventGhost enough to help with the others sorry, but for time could you just popup the standard status bar?
Try activating the following digital joins for status bar:
Toggle status bar: d17922
Show status bar: d17931
Hide status bar: d17932

[aslamma]

Yeah, I know about the status bar, but the numbers are really small so that won't fit my needs. Customization is what I want.

I suppose your main market is Crestron and AMX pro's and the eventghost plugin is just an aside? If so, it is understandable. But since eventghost doesn't have a lot of support and requires a lot of programming, it may also be good see what other HA software is out there to interface with. I like eventghost, but am not too interested in becoming a programmer to get it to do what I want. But that may be out of the scope if you are going more for the pro market.

[CommandFusion]

EventGhost plugin was mainly written to provide our customers with a way to have control over PC apps, without having to write our own PC software.

The J9 stuff interests me, just don't have time to work on a plugin. If anyone could get in touch with the J9 developer(s) we could help them with all the information they need for integrating with iViewer, but I guess we should leave more on that to direct emails or a different forum. Care to start a thread over on the J9 forums for us? (don't want to spam)

[aslamma]

Will event ghost be supported in the lite version?