What should a HB mobile app look like?

[Timoh]

Hi folks,
As I've been churning through my webremote project for over a year now, I've often wondered how useful it would be on mobile devices. I still think the final product should run fairly well on mobile browsers such as Safari or Chrome, and this should make it a quasi-mobile app.

That being said, I don't think we, as a community, have ever actually tried to define what a mobile should look like, what it should do, how it should work, how should we design the UI, + + +

It's all great to try and shoe-horn the current theme designer into a mobile device theme, but is that the right way to go? Do we need a "Mobile Theme Editor"?
How "customizable" do we want our mobile apps & screens? Do we want to be able to design layout? Or just show prearranged icons/buttons for each device, task, mode, etc?
How much do we want to be able to do from the mobile device? Edit Scripts? Edit Tasks? Edit??? Or just execute tasks, activate modes, change properties?

It's bound to come sooner or later for HB, so we may as well start inputting to it now!

Tim

[Richard Naninck]

Actually we already have a mobile app but it is outdated. I used to run a remote theme on my iPaq. Yes, an iPaq from HP some 6 years ago. It's just the same as the current remote + theme editer but for smaller screens. A simple iPhone app would not do it for me. I need the whole nine yards and I am happy with using LogMeIn as a remote desktop with all the nice zoom features it has. Running a full XGA theme is possible now on the iPad without having to zoom. If you did want to use the iPhone, it needs to be a rip off for just the most used features with all the basic buttons like key pads etc. I like the iPhone's Remote app a lot which controls iTunes and Apple TV. In short, I would be very happy with a remote for an iDevice or even Android or better yet specifically for Windows 8 Metro but it needs to be scalable so I can mainly use it on an iPad or any other >= 10" screen.

[edgar]

Great post Timoh,

It appears to me that HB was designed to be a thin side client with thick side server app. This is not unlike the way of cloud computing and VMware with thin client solutions are going.

Given that, I don't think the server side was ever intended to be mobile. If you need to get to the server a simple remote desktop app should be the solution. I think most mobile users really want/need the SWRemote functionality.

I would LOVE to see improvements on the server side with corresponding SWRemote functionality, like true integration of video streams and a few other things.

I think the mobile App for HB needs to be lean and mean just like the SWRemote is now but we need it on more platforms. It also needs to leverage bandwidth constrained networks which i think it does pretty well anyway when I had it running on my Windows Mobile phone.

If we had a SWRemote for other platforms it would be incredible! Where is linux for example...I would love running a SWRemote on the Rasberry PI $35 computer that is just around the corner. How awesome would that be?

v/r

Kevin

[art]

I think edgar nailed for me.