Home that work - Part Two - A new outlook

Okay, so it was a month not a week...

So, it's a given to many folks - including me - that the Ipad and IOS based devices change quite a bit about control but what exactly do they change and how does one make decisions about products and architectures?

Just getting a remote on an iOS device should not be the goal.

This is much worse than a tivo peanut or a tivo remote mapped onto a traditional hard button universal remote.

I'll say, however, that the entire remote model for the Tivo is just plain broken.

For now playing and basic transports, fine - anything that works for dvd, tivo, etc will work for all - the universal remote is not broken here.

But for content discovery, planning out multiple season passes, etc, the UI should be interactive and not take over the screen.  One should be able to go and schedule the season pass for the new HBO series you just saw a preview for while starting to watch Entourage, not instead.  Tivo has a somewhat lame webpage where some of these things can be done.  Comcast of all people, really gets where this needs to go.

But best is where you have both a machine level interface and a rich IOS gui.  Apple Remote is a case like this - the official interface is secret, unsupported and has been very stable and is widely known. Denon's control app is fairly lame but at least it is running the same interface as everything else.  Most all of the lighting systems are this way also (they have to be - need Keypads too in a lighting system.)

So, with that, I'll state my very short requirements list for iOS apps + devices to be controlled by iOS interfaces:

• iOS application should be complete if possible without requiring an on screen interface
• Device should still have interfaces for integration
• Optimized web interface is not awful at all unless it's too slow
• Putting a gateway plus a web service in between the iPad and the device seems risky unless it's just for locating the device.
• I'm wary of 3rd party apps unless the interface is extremely well known/public or the company has a strong allegiance to the supplier of the app - too much incentive in this area to create private interfaces
• 2-4 yr lifespan apps (i.e. you could be on Comcast because they had a cool iPad app but then switch to Tivo 3-years later) should/can be chosen based on the strength of the iOS features.
• 15-20 yr lifespan apps should be chosen on the strength of their infrastructure and the likely ability to support applications going forward (i.e. security panels + lighting controls.)
• If the subsystems don't have to talk, no consideration other than ease of service and ownership (which is non trivial) need be made for single vendor. I.e. if you like Crestron Lighting and Sonos Music and you don't intend for the two systems to interact (don't laugh - we do volume control on lighting keypads all the time) - then go right ahead.