Roomie gets some CSS schooling
June 24th, 2010This week I have been furiously re-writing a few key elements of the Roomie website. Specifically, I scrapped the old device button controls, which you can see here. They were ok, but they were very rigid in use, offering only two different pictures to back the buttons. Zooming on mobile devices didn’t work so great either, since the images were PNGs, raster graphics. Now I have created a button framework entirely in CSS, HTML, and ASP.NET controls. Because of this, I can easily create new kinds of controls completely in code, and they even zoom cleanly as well. My original vision for this was to enable the user to create “virtual device controls”, which would display next to the regular device controls.
The Joys of WebDev (and Google Chrome software updates?)
May 10th, 2010I was just working on Roomie (instead of studying for exams) and I cam across a very strange error.
RoomieRemake woke me up and made me coffee!
April 26th, 2010I recently rearranged the Z-Wave modules in my house to devices that I care about controlling more. I put one on the coffee maker so that I could preload it and either schedule it to turn on or turn it on through the Roomie website, which would be good for if I were heading home sometime and wanted a fresh cup waiting for me. I also put a module on my computer monitors and speakers, which are in my bedroom. This lets a script turn them off when I go to bed and back on right before a script wakes me up with music.
This morning RoomieRemake woke me up with two short scripts. And hey, more news! I used the recently-updated website (which I’ve apparently never directly blogged about) to write the scripts. Here’s a screenshot of that.
Here’s the script that ran on Dreaming Nest, my Home Server, which has a ThinkStick USB Z-Wave controller.
Hey! Roomie isn’t dead either!
February 11th, 2010After completely rewriting FRI from scratch (and renaming it Arcadia), I have decided to rewrite my other big project, Roomie. This absolutely needed to be done. Roomie had some good functionality, but I had hit the limit for its extensibility. Roomie’s engine was a monolithic blob of ugly code, with very little room to make it into a full scripting language with features like custom functions and if statements. My redesign of Roomie, which I call RoomieRemake for now, is completely expandable, is properly multithreaded, and has all of the potential to be a robust, featurefull scripting language. Just like Arcadia, I am proud to declare that RoomieRemake shares absolutely no code with its predecessor. Not even a single copy/pasted line of code! More on that in a bit, but first an end scenario: 
Roomie Mobile Update
January 28th, 2010Remember Roomie? Today I updated Roomie Mobile. This version includes a second dimming option and more touch-friendly buttons. Check it out in the video below.
