I had a talk with a designer that I ran into. He helped me out to get to a design for the Windows app that I think is a very good starting point for a beautiful app.
What do you think? any pointers / remarks / thumb-ups?
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Looking good! How do you see the process of customising which the items? Through a sitemap, or through the app itself?
probably sitemaps. I was thinking of a setting that allows you to choose a sitemap to be in the favorites bar
I would pledge for building on sitemaps, so that it is in line with iOS and Android approaches. If people desire a dashboard-like UI, I’d suggest to concentrate the efforts on HABPanel instead.
I feel the approach of using special sitemaps is a good approach. The interesting thing to work through will be how the app renders the same site map on different device screen sizes.
Also consider more functionality in a smaller widget… An example would be your mock up of a light switch with the icon and then On/Off next to it… Ideally clicking on the icon would toggle the switch and change the icon slightly.
I feel @Kai is keen to get a windows app similar to the existing iOS and Android apps up and running however I think even the existing classic web app is just fine. I think larger screen tablets and dashboards is the way to go so you should soldier on with your new design, again HABPanel is interesting but to someone who hasn’t dived into OH2 I get the impression it’s not idiot friendly to setup and configure.
I’ve got a bunch of ideas on this type of stuff but no real technical expertise so would enjoy helping out any way I can.
I don’t think that using sitemaps and having potentially bigger screen sizes contradicts each other.
My wish is that it should USE the information from the sitemaps (and not require any further, Windows-specific layout information) - how stuff is rendered is up to the UI and I think the design prototype looks neat and would (mostly) fit in this strategy.
Note that iOS and Android apps are also used on tablets where they use a multi column layout. Basic UI also goes for a two column layout by default.