Indigo Domotics

In our family room I have a 40in TV and a 30in Apple Display for viewing cams and to do some monitoring via an INDOGO Control Page.



Larger Pic: http://www.smallrvs.ca/dnloads/LivRoom.png

I want to create a popup that will be invisible until needed.
I'm thinking of something, perhaps AppleScript? or?

The popup would be used as an alarm indicator.
Example:
Garage doors have Zwave TiltSensors on them.
Popup App dormant, nothing visible.
Garage door opens, a Timer is started.
If door not closed within 10 minutes I want the popup to come to foreground over the top of the Cameras.
Popup will probably just be a large red square, perhaps with a message.
Garage door is closed, popup disappears leaving cameras back as they were.

I used to do this with a dedicated RealBasic App but that turned into a mtce nightmare so I'm hoping there will be some suggestions to perhaps do it in AppleScript or Python?

Would there be a way to show/hide a control page via an INDIGO trigger/variable?

The problem here is that control pages don't actually "run" on the Mac - they're served by the Mac but run either in a browser or in Indigo Touch - so AppleScript/Python (or any script for that matter) are non-starters. This would require that those clients understand some kind of notification mechanism that would "push" a new control page. That doesn't exist today but is something on our request list to consider in future versions.

It's possible that you might be able to figure out some way to hack the IWS templates and have Javascript do some trickiness - but it would require some non-trivial knowledge of JavaScript, Cheetah templates, and the current IWS layouts (which will change significantly in Indigo 7 whenever that's released) and it would only work in a browser (the iOS client doesn't render using HTML/CSS/JavaScript). Basically, I really don't recommend attempting that.

If I were to limit activity to my ControlPage do you think I could use a simple on/off with 2 large images layered on top of current images?

The off image would be transparent. Would the underlying images show through?
The on image would be same size but coloured red.

Sounds easy, but would/should it work?
Main concern of course would be that the transparent off image would even be possible.

Edit:
Works!
Have to tweak the image yet but basically I erased the off image and all the underneath shows.
Sometimes it does comes together right after asking

One other note/hint -- you can add a variable display for your message on top of your image if you want to be able to show multiple messages without an image for each. Set the "message" variable value and the on/off for the image so that both appear; to clear just blank out the variable and turn the image to off.

I had it doing something somewhat similar in one version of my pages.

Adam

Got it working.
Still a work-in-progress but the basic principal works.

For the off image I just left a small spot of color so that I have a reference when working with the image. The color is same as background so blends in and color spot small enough so as not to cover anything.

I'll overlay three different spots, one for each garage door and since they are only viewed at a distance, no text necessary.

Since the garage doors should never be open very long I'm not even going to bother with a timer for now.

Clever...