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smarty
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Joined: May 21 2006
Location: United States
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Posts: 728
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| Posted: May 21 2006 at 14:09 | IP Logged
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EXTREME Newbie Questions....
I am just starting off with PH and I have a couple of questions before I fully commit to it.
1) Once you have a nice Control Center layout built up (like some of the screen shots I have seen in this forum), I want to make sure that it is possible to use a touchscreen display and interact with the Control Center via the touchscreen. This should all be hardware dependent (NOT PH dependant) right? I just want to make sure that PH doesn't have any little glitches that will prevent me from buying some touchscreens and using PH in a touch fashion.
2) I have been playing with PH a little (I have my Insteon devices set-up, a few buttons for voice annoucements etc.). How do you set-up web links....like TV listings (Zap2it) or a home page that you want to quickly see? I am not looking to write a bunch of code to strip information off a page (at least not yet). I need to just start with the basiscs first and figure out how to "launch" to a page.
Thanks
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TonyNo
Moderator Group
Joined: December 05 2001
Location: United States
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Posts: 2889
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| Posted: May 21 2006 at 16:15 | IP Logged
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Welcome to PH!
Would the touch screen(s) be connected to the PH machine or remote?
I have a touch screen in my foyer running Firefox that I use to access my system. This is driven by a small HP PC. I don't use the Control Center, although I could. Just custom web pages until we get graphics in the CC or some other front-end support.
If you mean links in the CC, you would need to be using the Web CC and to maybe set up a frames page with your links in one frame and the CC (content) in another.
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Manny
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Joined: March 23 2003
Location: United States
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Posts: 172
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| Posted: May 22 2006 at 04:17 | IP Logged
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Hi Smarty,
I was in the same place a couple of weeks ago that you are in now as far as touchscreens with PowerHome go. Like you I was impressed with the screenshots presented by the power users on the forum. So, I just had to get a touchscreen. I finally did and found out a couple of things.
1) I suck at graphic design and basic web page creation. Sure I can make a web page to turn a light off and on, but the pages end up looking like my butt with teeth (way ugly).
2) The people on this board are awesomely helpful (props to Tony and Dave) as far as answering any of your questions.
To your two issues:
1) As far as I know a touchscreen is as hardware/software dependent as a mouse is (usb,serial, drivers, etc). If you can click on something with a mouse you can simulate the click with a poke of the finger to the screen. It won't be because of PowerHome if you have any issues with a touchscreen.
a) Using a touchscreen attached to the PC running PowerHome (touchscreen monitor or overlay connected to the PC server, or touchtablet pc running PowerHome). The Contol Center in the PowerHome application has rectangular buttons Example1you can create, that work flawlessly with a touchscreen, again just like clicking with a mouse. You can also make those squarish buttons invisible and click/poke whatever pretty graphics you have as a background.Example2
b) Your touchscreen is attached to a client. More work is involved here as you may not be clicking/poking directly at the PowerHome application window. You will be clicking/poking at either
web pages created by PowerHome Example3,
or
webpages created by yourselfExample4,
or
by using a third party frontend Example5,or
finally by using a 3rd party remote client software (RemoteDesktop by Microsoft(server=XP Pro), VNC (many flavors by many opensource authors) ,Radmin, etc.)
All of the above options have worked with my touchscreens.
I did have a problem however with the transparent buttons on web pages created by PowerHome. After a while only the edges of the tranparent buttons would accept my touch. This would force me to take a long time to activate a control(very hard for me to find the edge of a transparent button!)
Disclaimer: I have not seen this posted as an issue and I usually find out that these things happen only to me because of something I have done. On ImageMaps (PowerHome or FrontPage created) however everything works fine.
2)Creating links:
If using PowerHome by itself. Assuming you have PowerHome Web server setup already (Enable Web server Checked in setup page).
a)Go into PowerHome Explorer
b)Go into Setup/Web/
c)In Menu Section find an empty pair of fields.
d)Type Weather in left field (Title:)
e)Type http://www.weather.com in the right field (URL #:).
f)Close the PowerHome Explorer, don't need to close PowerHome.
g) Go into WebCenter (Menu: Control/Web Center or the little globe icon)
You should see Weather as a link on the main PH web page (psp page).
That's the easiest way I know of.
Check the forum or Google and you will find many html examples for your own web pages. You can actually google for "weather magnets" to find cut and paste code to display weather, traffic,etc..Example6
Here are mine:
example7
example8
I ended up getting a couple of Fujitsu Stylistic 3500s off of eBay (precursors to todays TabletPC's difference being that you can use your finger on the screen vs only a special pen.)This way I didn't need to get another video card or run long video cables or get special connectors, etc. I can have them around the house as web pads and Home Automation control screens. I also ended up using Xlobby as my frontend for PowerHome (example 5 above), until PH is able to do the same graphically.
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Topic: Web Links....Tv listings etc
