New client alpha versions available

A nice update of the client is available for all supported platforms. This update introduces some new functionalities, changes and improvements. Let's start with the changes before you close the page to get the new version.

Introduced changes

1. Looks on all platforms:
   1. Taking a more material style approach design,
   2. Bigger touch controls,
   3. Icons in the bottom of the menu are now named,
   4. We have our own icon font now, this has been introduced in the interface,
   5. Color scheme for the dark default theme adjusted,
   6. Brought web interface coloring to the clients,
2. Looks on Desktop and Pi platform:
   1. Color scheme for the light theme adjusted (almost one on one with the web interface).
3. Functionalities:
   1. Due to large demand we changed the slider control to be a more native horizontal one,
   2. The default toggle button has changed from a static version to a more dynamic version, but we removed the control label,
   3. We intended to only have the favorite macros available on the clients, this has now been changed.

Bug fixes

1. FINALLY REAL ALPHABETICAL ORDERED LISTS! No more swapping of list order when navigating between lists, yeah this annoyed me a lot too,
2. Fixed the color picker, you could only select the color the first time of opening the color control,
3. Fixed slider, in some edge cases it only worked the first time,
4. Fixed single button control, in some edge cases it didn't work at all,
5. Improvements in reconnect strategy on the Raspberry Pi when the connection to the server was lost,
6. Presence icon often misbehaved, applying wrong color on correct presence icon,

Improvements

1. All the clients now fully make use of HTTP2 over SSL which provides a nice performance improvement and secure on all clients,
2. Massive speed improvements in rendering components on all platforms,
3. Menu now slides in from the left instead of POOF there it is and ahh... and now it's gone,
4. On the Pi when doing a swipe down on the dashboard is more responsive and opens the top bar menu much more fluid.
5. On Android the localization feature now uses about 90% less battery.
6. No need anymore to have the Android client on foreground to report localization data to the server*,
7. Corrected popup dimensions,
8. List views are now three times as fast.

Added features

1. On the Raspberry Pi and Desktop the presences screen now includes a map,
2. Mobile now support ADHOC location updates in presence view.

Known bugs/improvements needed

1. In the macro list the text is not correctly visible on mobile,
2. When the server incorrectly marks a media item running the client will not recover from this and you need to restart the client,
3. On Android drop down lists are often just misbehaving, i found no solution for this yet.

Let's talk about the update

For the interested, here some explanations in the changes and improvements made. And yes, this also includes some todos for in the near future.

GPS update

As shown in the Improvements list the localization service is using almost no battery anymore. The change we made is that we now make use of a different technology to get the GPS data. Instead of continuesly polling the GPS chip we now ask the device the last known location. This is done once per minute when there are continues GPS updates (for example there is a route planner or maps active) and every two minutes when there is no GPS service running. The app now also only sends the data to your server when there has been movement, so even when one or two minutes have passed, no connection is made when you have not moved. This method have saved in our measurements about 90% of battery usage (as reported by a Samsung Note 4 test device). This improvment has been achieved by utilizing the Google Play Services.

Rendering improvements

A massive improvment has been achieved in rendering the components on screen. I completely wallked through the app where items are rendered to the screen. On a lot of places reoutines where performed while the app was rendering an update on the screen which caused heavy stuttering. Also now visuals that do not change often are being cached. This means they do not need recalculations which also caused stuttering. Along these mentional improvements a lot of smaller improvements have been done to make the UI more responsive. This has improved list views, menu renderings, graph renderings and much more.

GPS Map added

We have added a GPS map to Desktop based version of the client. This is more of a proof of concept of the usage of the webview on the Raspberry Pi and supports real time updates. This implementation make of the OpenStreetMap project to display the maps. This map functionality is only active for clients that have both their GPS settings enabled on both the mobile/tablet client and in the server's clients configuration.

Todos

Of course we are not done yet, soon new addional features and changes will be done which are:

1. Make use of the updated floorplan in the server 2d for mobile and 2d+3d for Desktop based platforms,
2. Improve visuals, we started to go more material, so this needs to be continued,
3. Provide the mobile versions with both the light and dark themes,
4. Split the WIFI Home and GPS functionality,
5. Make a proper settings view,
6.  - Secret implementation -,
7.  - Suprise implementation -.

Some screenshots of the update

Here some screenshots of the update. These are mixed for both the light and dark themes. Again, these designs are not final, but the approach we are taking is quite present. The light version shown of the Raspberry Pi interface will soon also be available on the Mobile devices and introduced as the new standard interface. This will make the dark interfce selectable.

Mobile

     

Raspberry Pi