CEPro, the magazine read by home automation installers and designers, has come out with a very good article on Vista's media center capabilities. I definitely wish I had Vista when we wrote Intuition which was used to control some of the largest homes in the world.
Now that the company is no more I can freely talk about Intuition. This software was if I may humble say was ahead of its time. It was a home automation system based on SOA. This allowed for remote controls, touch pads, embedded PCs and web access to control the home using SOAP.
The reason I wish we had Vista is for 2 particular features of Vista. The first is SideShow and the other is Rally. SideShow is a very cool technology for driving auxiliary displays. So for example we had custom PCs created that could be embedded into the walls. These displays were used to run web browsers to access a Flash based client to control every feature of a home. The problem with this is the cost and quite frankly a PC to run Flash was overkill. With SideShow we could just make LCD displays that use SideShow gadgets to run the display. In addition, a remote could be created that used SideShow allowing for two way interactions.
Rally is even more unique. It is a standard for device manufacturers to follow and build device interfaces using SOA technologies. In Intuition we hid the devices behind a facade of web services. This allowed us to control devices using SOAP. We even had control systems like Crestron and Vantage that used TCP/IP and even TCP/IP to serial devices. In particular we used Lantronic's product which basically looked like a cigarette box with a serial port on one end and RJ45 on the other. This little box ran a tiny computer that converted the serial I/O to TCP/IP traffic. In addition it had a web server. Now image this in a device with a builtin web service to run the device.
Intuition was hugely complex in order to pull off all the feature and control we needed. Vista would have cut down the complexity. Home Automation is still very complex but as Rally Devices come out this might allow for the era of the plug and play home.
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