Wednesday, September 5, 2012

iPad home controls

Controlling Your Home With The Touch Of An iPad, article and video.

To be honest, I don't really think that what we see here is all that important. Light switches and remote controls still work fine. But I think the people here touch on an important point: that iPhones and iPad are very enabling technologies. Just one small example is the home weather station which I just got. Just five years ago it would have been much more expensive, not just from general technology development, but also because at that point the company would have had to build in their own control/information display, and that would have been difficult and expensive, and surely would not have been very good, based on such displays I have seen! (Low-res and poorly designed interfaces.) But now they just have to make an iPhone/iPad app, and so they can sell a much cheaper product to those tens of millions of people who already have those.

And lord know what kinds of things will come from these technologies in the future? Every year I see new things that I would never have dreamed of. Sometimes they are things which pre-exist, but in a form which is poorer and way more expensive. And sometimes they are just brand new ideas.

3 comments:

ttl said...

Personal weather stations and apps for them have been available for decades. (Currently Weather Cat is a popular choice for the Mac.)

The only new thing the iPad "enables" WRT personal weather stations is to allow one to carry the display around the office/living quarters. But how often do you need to check the weather per day?

Home control, on the other hand, is a different matter. Adjusting the lighting, blinkers, TV, sound system, etc. are activities we pretty much constantly perform. Here the tablet's portability is clearly an advantage.

ttl said...

With weather station software, there's also the issue of storage space. Much of the "weather hobby" has to do with collecting data, and then running stats on it. Even if you wanted to use the tablet as your display, you probably wouldn't want to use the tablet's SDD for the database.

ttl said...

Correction: SSD.