EventGhost

For those that have been following development of my EventGhost fork SatoriHub in this thread or this other one, I just uploaded version 0.4.0 Alpha. You can follow the progress in my Changelog, or download and try it yourself.

Headlining the changes in this release are international support and now the plugins are bundled with the installer. I created initial translations using string matching of the EG translation files. It certainly wasn't perfect, but it picked up a fair amount. Bundling the plugins was mostly for convenience.

I've also come up with an analogy for EG vs. SatoriHub. EG is a high end camera, giving you fine grain control of every aspect of picture taking. SatoriHub is the same camera, except it has an automatic mode that you can use until you get comfortable tweaking the rest of the settings. Oh, and you will get newer models of SatoriHub.

Unless there are unexpected issues with this release, I expect to move to Beta soon. I would encourage some of you EG users to give the Alpha/Beta versions a try. Now is by far the easiest time to get functionality built into SatoriHub. Along the lines of having an automatic mode, my goal is to enable more functionality in plugins, so the end-user doesn't need to do as much setup. That was one of the reasons for bundling plugins with the installer - I'm wondering about having (for example) a program plugin that can enable multitap and pass the resulting string to the programs search control with a click of a button. No configuration necessary.

If you have ideas, bring 'em on.

Brett

Hi Brett, before I start trying, can I have Satori installed in parallel to EG or do I need to un-install EG first? Any risk for conflicts having them running at the same time?

Best regards, Walter

Walter,

There's no problem having both installed on the same machine. Running them at the same time is not recommended. It can cause issues with the plugins, for instance there can be only one connection to an MCE IR receiver, so EG and SatoriHub can't both be connected. Also, I'd imagine it would be confusing having both responding to the same events.

The 0.4.0 Alpha with Qt4.7 seems to have an issue related to the PyQt bindings, so you should use the SatoriHub_0.4.0_Setup_4.6.exe (13.37 MB) (Qt4.6 instead of Qt4.7) until I get a fix out (or a fixed version of PyQt is released).

Brett

Okay, thanks Brett

No problem. Let me know if you have any questions.

Brett

I,m sorry but i have to say that satory is a fail paragoned to eventghost.
The interface concept that u trying to build is really confusing and in certain aspect are a limitation for the user.
With eventGhost u can use to anything and u can stack unlimited number of action in every macro. in satory i can see...4 group action ?
U can drag and drop the event from log to the tree...here you have to write down the event.
Thanks for the try anyway.

edward.81 wrote:I,m sorry but i have to say that satory is a fail paragoned to eventghost.
The interface concept that u trying to build is really confusing and in certain aspect are a limitation for the user.
With eventGhost u can use to anything and u can stack unlimited number of action in every macro. in satory i can see...4 group action ?
U can drag and drop the event from log to the tree...here you have to write down the event.
Thanks for the try anyway.

My feeling on EG is that it is an interface only developers can love. The tree is effective and very flexible, but you have to configure everything. For example, adding a new application to control requires pushing every button on your remote and drag and dropping the events to the correct macro. For every application! And then dealing with exclusion macros, and jumpIf, etc is confusing to many as well.

Obviously SatoriHub is confusing to you. Hopefully that can be fixed with some adjustments to the UI and more documentation.

I believe most users start with EG/SatoriHub because they want to control their computer with an IR remote. So I took the fundamental task - associating events to actions - and broke that into three groups. There are Remote events, Autonomous events and Generic events. In EG everything is a generic event, where you need to define the trigger event (drag and drop from the log), then assign the actions under the macro. SatoriHub provides this functionality as Generic events, but I expect it not to be used very often - the other ways to configure event handling (Remote and Autonomous) are intended to help with most use cases and be easier to use.

How's how it is intended to work. The goal for remotes is to be able to assign actions to every button and every application based on the button name, without worrying about events at all. Just double-click on the icon in the button's row and the application's column and assign the action(s) you want. And if plugins use the standard button names for actions, those actions will already be associated with the buttons without any configuration from the user.

Autonomous actions are ones that are generated without user interaction (System.Idle, DirectoryWatcher type stuff). The idea is for the plugin to define these, so instead of waiting for the event to occur so you can drag and drop, you just find the event in the list on that tab and define the action there. You can certainly create these a Generic events, but I thought it would be easier to select the event from the list of events produced by the plugin rather than waiting for the event so you could drag and drop. Unfortunately, there are probably quite a few events that should be listed as autonomous that haven't been set up that way yet. I think this is more growing pains than a flaw in the design, though.

The goal is to make the most common tasks easiest, while still allowing all of the functionality you can achieve with EG.

With the above in mind, SatoriHub still may not do what you want (hopefully it makes more sense why it was designed the way it is, though). No problem, thanks for giving it a try and providing feedback. If you don't mind, though, I would appreciate more detail on what you are trying to do that SatoriHub doesn't support. The Group function's limit to 5 actions is only in the UI, adding more comma separated actions in the text box is certainly not convenient but is possible. This is something that has been in the back of my mind to enhance, but I thought the need for it would be extremely rare.

SatoriHub is also adding more functionality to the plugins. For instance, I've added a StartOrBringToFront action for program plugins like TheaterTek and JRMC. In addition, I've combined the StartOrBringToFront with a LongPress action that starts/brings to foreground on short press and exits the app on longpress. So this common functionality is a single action instead of several. The idea being to have one person (the plugin developer) do the work, so that all the end users get more functionality with less configuration.

Brett

Thanks for reply...
i think to know what u want to do. i remember uICE. Where user have to assign to any remote key a predefined name like pause vol+ etc. next the user can add a program/plugin ad have already the action to remote association. I said like uirc because i don't have tried satory with remote because my uirt2 receiver is not supported. But i don't matter at the moment.
I like and dislike this. First for all because i pick a random remote control to program. Now i love the remote of not more existent stereo. And u can understand that it don't have any of the predefined key request for a htpc application. (Up Down ?) So i just inventing what key do that thing or another depending also for the app that i want to control.
So i can't have a button that do play for any thing lol.
Another thing that i have see is the limitation of UI. For example i have used EG also for other thing. Like binding key for quick accessing PC function. For example turning On/off Dolby headphone from my audio card with a keyboard key (Like when i'm start playing a game (yes i'm using the pc like a pc not like an htpc so when i want to watch a movie i just rotate the monitor in the bed direction and use my remote to control it)).Now these day i have thinked to use it for just build some macro for some boring and repetitive action, thing failed for some bug/issue that EG have) If you think with EG u can do everything and not only controlling an htpc application.
And this is the fact, satori is a bit limited and too straight to an htpc controlling app.

Anyway. I don't think that this cont too much and sorry for my bad English. Hoping that is understandable.

The intent is not to require a remote plugin. You can still use the Generic events to create random macros. And you should be able (within the remote plugin) to create whatever remote buttons you want and still have them work (you could create a "edward.81" button if you wanted). However, without a working remote plugin, I can see SatoriHub looking a lot less useful.

Thanks for the feedback, if you have suggestions for how to make SatoriHub work better for you I would still like to hear them.

Brett

Hi Brett,

Thanks for getting the Hauppauge plugin ported to SatoriHub, Unfortunately I can't use that plugin anymore as I wasn't able to get my Hauppauge TV card to work in Win7 64bit.

So now I'm using a TechnoTrend Budget c-1501 to receive the IR signal, and I found a plugin for EventGhost here, any chance for you to port it to SatoriHub? as I'd like to test the new version.

jonib

I'll see about including that plugin in the next release.

Brett

stottle wrote:I'll see about including that plugin in the next release.

Cool thanks, I was going to see if I could port it myself, but that hasn't happened so I gave up.

jonib