Indigo Pet Peeves

I've been using this application for what...over six years now...longer? It constantly gets better and better...and what I can do now is much more advanced than what I could do before...but the past two years I've struggled a bit with having a user interface (running off a remote touch screen) in that by using the web server over a network...I tap a button on the UI...wait for it to go to another screen (4-5 seconds) when what I want is something almost instant.

Now this works pretty well if you are on the Indigo server as all the data is local and nothing has to travel over the network...but the way it currently works is that all my devices (iPods and Nokia N800) is that you go from page to page...no cache. So you load all the buttons again and again.

But the one way to fix this easily that has never been implemented is...since we can build UI/Control pages almost any size...a button command that just did a page up and page down would allow me to load the entire page of buttons and then just have a scroll down to some anchor almost immediately. I don't have to go to another page because all the buttons are on one page and I can expand my UI down, for example.

Right now on my wall mounted iPod touch...I can fit 9 buttons...I could fit more but this gives me a nice finger size for my fat digits. On my Nokia N800 I can fit about 12.

However...

I have buttons for timers, for the living room, for vacation, for the kitchen, for outdoors, etc...and to me it makes more sense to just load the page once and be able to simply tap a button for living room and it jumps down to the living room buttons...giving it the illusion I went somewhere else. This is also a big problem on the iPod because it doesn't hold the pages in cache so it loads them again and again...forcing a 4-5 second wait...which may seem silly to complain about...but when you are trying to do something "critical," each second counts.

Anyway..not trying to be difficult...I love the software, promote it all the time, and will continue to use it...but boy that sure would be a nice feature to have...even on an iPad.

[jay (support)]

As a workaround, you could implement this yourself by building your own web pages (serving out of, say Apache) and calling the RESTful APIs to actually perform the work. Not as nice as something built-in but it is an alternative.

You have a tremendous faith in my abilities with Apache...unfortunately the skills aren't really there.



I do think however, it would be a better way to execute a UI...since everything only needs to be loaded once.

My work around for fast page access is to make the page four times as wide as the physical iPod screen. This wide screen contains four normal size screens side by side, and a quick finger swipe brings any one into view. Not ideal but it works for me.

And how do you implement dimming on an N800?

Do you have to have separate buttons for that to set specific dim levels since no slider is available like on the iOS devices?