First off, I would like to say great job in creating this remote control system. It is easy to configure and interfaces with a multitude of devices. I’ve attempted this myself over the years using other home automation software, but reconfiguring each time I replace a device became tedious. Your software, along with your channel guide, is an affordable interface to my AV equipment and my home automation software. With that being said, I would like to present my wish list for future features. I believe these features will provide more control and versatility to the software.
- Add a “hide activity from the user” option. The thought here is to have a popup activity give the user choices, and the user’s selection will activate the corresponding activity. This selected activity will be hidden, along with the other choices, so that the users is always forced to go through the popup.
- Add a command to close a popup activity. This command could be added to a button’s command list so that user does not need to press the done command to close the popup.
- Ability add text boxes to remotes. Currently I use buttons to display text, but there are size limitations to buttons. The main idea here is to provide user-prompts that are large enough to read.
- Add individual button size control options (small, medium, large) to remotes. Again, this provides more room for text and makes priority buttons easier to select.
- When calling an activity from a command button. Give the option to bypass start and stop commands. The idea here is: if the AV devices are already in the desired condition and the remote is not on the correct remote then (through possibly a popup menu) you could call up just the remote. This prevents all the unwanted input selection messages and guides from appearing on the TV while other are already watching it. One would think that you could just use the remote option for the device in the activities menu, but this remote is not customized, does not have guide options & alternate volume control.
- The ability to select channel guides through commands. Currently you can only assign one guide to an activity. This change will give you the ability to create a popup activity (hidden of course) where you can select guides with different channel favorites.
- Another option to the channel selection would be the ability to change the guides from within the guide. There could be a button that pulls up a guide favorites selection. However, the guide menu Is pretty cluttered already.
- Add toggle-on and toggle-off commands to buttons. What I am looking for here is binary variables that can be used a conditionals. You already do this with toggle mode activities, which is fine, but you can’t force an on or off state and they aren’t hidden.
- Allow the proximity automation action to trigger off of a beacon. This is already done for automatic room detection, but I can’t add other actions. Right now the beacon must be a linked simple control remote to trigger an action.