HomeVisionXL News

HomeVisionXL beta 2.0b9 released

24 August 2008, 23:50 CEST

HomeVisionXL beta 2.0b9 is available. The Action Editor has undergone a complete overhaul. It now has undo/redo capabilities. You can quickly change one or more commands to other related commands through the context menu, like changing Light On commands to Light Off. You can comment and uncomment a range of commands. And on commands referring to certain kinds of objects you can now get tooltips showing the current value of the objects.

The X-10 Sequence screen no longer has a "Change This Signal" button that you need to press to actually change the signal. That now happens automatically and immediately. The serial command screen has a context menu to help you to easily enter a serial command string without having to lookup the exact wording in the documentation every time. The comment screen has a similar context menu for entering directives.

Finally in this version, you can customize the tool bars on the Main Screen and the Action Editor to give easy access to the functions you use the most.

For more details see the changelog on the HomeVisionXL 2.0 beta download page: http://hv.tclcode.com/beta/download.html

Revisiting the minor updates of August 1st.

7 August 2008, 11:55 CEST

For plug-ins to work well with both current and future versions of HomeVisionXL they should use [file normalize [file dirname [info script]]] when they want to determine the location of the plug-in. The previously suggested [file dirname [info script]] would sometimes produce a relative path, which suddenly points to the wrong place when the working directory changes.

Please upgrade if you are using w800 version 1.1, callerid version 1.5 or organize version 1.5.

Remote plug-in and remote client updates

3 August 2008, 23:37 CEST

The remote plug-in and remote clients have been updated to work with plug-ins making use of some version 2.0 features, like PNG image support and the newer tile version. In addition the clients will provide better diagnostics in case of problems and will allow the user to correct wrong server settings.

In addition some outstanding minor updates to a number of other plug-ins have been released:
Debug plug-in: Allow plug-ins to specify colors for their reports.
Organize plug-in: Correction in determining the next event.
Xmms plug-in: Publish player status for the control plug-in.

Minor update to several plug-ins

1 August 2008, 11:46 CEST

A number of plug-ins was making use of the fact that during initialization of the plug-in the [pwd] command would return the directory where the plug-in is located. This feature was undocumented and is about to be changed in the next version of HomeVisionXL.

The correct way to determine the location of the plug-in is to use [file dirname [info script]]. In upcoming versions of HomeVisionXL [pwd] will always return the actual current working directory for HomeVisionXL.

The plug-ins that were incorrectly using [pwd] in this way have been corrected.

Track plug-in update

1 August 2008, 10:50 CEST

There was a small correction to the track plug-in to allow it to work again in combination with HomeVisionXL 1.15. Versions 2.4 through 2.6 would give no problems when used with HomeVisionXL 2.0, but produced an error in older versions. This has been corrected with version 2.7 of the plug-in.

VoIP plug-in update

31 July 2008, 12:33 CEST

A new version of the VoIP plug-in is available. The new version now includes the external packages needed by the plug-in. It also adds the possibility to configure a display name for each account.

When recording speech to a WAV file, a link with a fixed name per account will be created or updated, pointing to the last file recorded for that account. This makes it much easier to send the file as an attachment using the sendmail plug-in. This function will only work on filesystems that support the use of links (all unix/linux filesystems or Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista on NTFS drives).

Voice over IP plug-in released

29 July 2008, 15:51 CEST

A new plug-in for HomeVisionXL has been released. The voice over IP plug-in will allow you to call your homevision and get it to report on the current state of your house. You can create actions in your schedule that can be controlled using the keypad of the phone. It is also possible to instruct homevision to call your mobile or office phone (or both) and inform you of the situation when certain events occur.

Another possibility is to give your homevision sophisticated answering machine capabilities. It could play different messages depending on the time of day, or the person calling. The message left by the caller can be saved to a WAV file, which makes it easy to send it to your mailbox as an email attachment.

All you need is a VoIP account that uses the SIP protocol and the new voip plug-in. For more information, see http://hv.tclcode.com/voip.html

Yac plug-in update

27 July 2008, 12:08 CEST

Version 1.3 of the yac plug-in is now available. The only changes compared to version 1.2 are cosmetic.

When the video mode is something other than "macro", the macro selection is meaningless. For this reason the macro selection option is now disabled unless the "macro" video mode is selected.

The "Cancel" and "OK" buttons would not appear centered when the plug-in was used with HomeVisionXL 2.0. This has been corrected.

HomeVisionXL news feed launched

26 July 2008, 17:42 CEST

There is now a RSS feed for HomeVisionXL news available. This makes it easy for people to keep up-to-date about new releases of HomeVisionXL and related tools and plug-ins. The RSS feed can be accessed through the RSS icon on the HomeVisionXL news web page.

HomeVisionXL beta 2.0b8 released

26 July 2008, 15:19 CEST

HomeVisionXL beta 2.0b8 has been released. Among other new features and bug fixes, this version fixes the problem that would occur when downloading a schedule after reordering certain types of objects and subsequently adding new objects of the same type.

For more details see the changelog on the HomeVisionXL 2.0 beta download page: http://hv.tclcode.com/beta/download.html

Control plug-in update

26 July 2008, 15:08 CEST

The control plug-in has three new commands that can be used in the actions of a button:
1. ImageRefresh - Check for changed images
2. EditMode - Switch to edit mode.
3. AccessCode - Allow the implementation of a code lock.

The plug-in now automatically generates tables with the names of objects. This can help to reduce maintenance work on the control screens. When an object name is changed in the schedule it will automatically be picked up by the control screen.

The packaging mechanism has changed. When saving control screens as a .hpz file, the contents will be the same as it used to be. But when saving as a .zip file, the package will not contain the plug-in itself and the file containing the screen layout will not be renamed to default.ctl. A package in .hpz form is intended to be used with the remote plugin, while the .zip form is ideal for copying control screens to another PC or sharing them with other users.

Amarok plug-in update

26 July 2008, 12:52 CEST

The Amarok plug-in has been updated to work with KDE4. Shutting down the PC can now be done using either dcop or dbus.

There is also a new serial command for starting playback if not already playing. Contrary to the normal play command, it will not restart the current track if playback is already in progress.

Another new feature is the option to automatically delete tracks from the playlist when the track has a score below a user specified threshold and the plug-in receives the command to skip the track.

Weather plug-in update

25 July 2008, 12:24 CEST

The national weather service made a change in their weather data URL. The old plug-in now fails to retrieve weather data.

I've updated the plug-in to version 1.3, to use the new URL. In the process of making this change, I modified the Data Source Configuration tab to include a way for the user to change it just in case something like this happens again. The current URL is also stored in the .ini file now.