Android app and 15 button remotes?

[wkearney99]

What does the app use to determine whether or not to show just 5 buttons at a time, or all 15 buttons when viewing a 15 button keypad?

Because I'd like to have a way to force it to show all 15 when using an android tablet in landscape mode. I can understand how it would be problematic on a phone in portrait mode. But in landscape mode there's more than enough room to show all 3 sets of the buttons.

[Craig W.]

In the Lutron Home Control+ app if you are on the control & monitor screen and have a 15 button table top keypad selected all 15 buttons will be displayed on the iPad.

[wkearney99]

In the Lutron Home Control+ app if you are on the control & monitor screen and have a 15 button table top keypad selected all 15 buttons will be displayed on the iPad.

Which is not what I asked, I'm well aware of what the iPad app does with these. It didn't seem necessary for me to post that.

I asked what the Android app does to determine NOT to display all 15 at once, to default to just showing only 5 of them at a time, even when in landscape mode.

I asked this because, in my experience, there are sometimes assumptions that apps (android and IOS) make when it comes to limiting their features based on incorrect assumptions about device features or user intentions/desires. As in something like the Sonos app, which assumes if the resolution is less than a certain amount (but still well-capable) it won't allow the app to rotate. However, using a 'force rotation' app it can be convinced to do so and lose no features or functionality in the process.

So I'm asking here whether the Lutron android app is making similar assumptions, or whether it was a deliberate design choice to cripple it to using only 5 buttons at a time. If it was a design choice then I humbly request it be changed to allow for showing all 15 buttons of the control when in landscape mode (regardless of assumptions about the detected device resolution).

[Craig W.]

I apologize for the confusion. The Lutron Home Control+ app decides on how to display the information based on what the device being used reports its device type as. If the device being used does not report that it is a tablet then the app will display the information the same way as it does on a phone. Tablets that have a 7inch screen tend to not report their device types as tablets.

[wkearney99]

That doesn't quite concur with how apps handle calculating their requirements. It's not really the device that says it's a tablet or not. It's the app that decides which of the many different resolutions and densities it wants to support.
http://developer.android.com/guide/p...gTabletLayouts

So given the truly SIMPLE layout the Lutron+ app requires it seems a presumptive to force display of 15-button keypads as only 5 at a time when in landscape mode. For apps with a lot of data to display, sure, a certain minimum is genuinely necessary for the app to function. I'd argue this is not one of those situations. Now, will users complain about this? Not unless they know better, or have used the keypads on larger devices.

I'd like to request that the next rev of the app either not assume 5-at-a-time for display in landscape mode, or provide an option to do chose which style is preferred.

[Craig W.]

Thank you for your feedback on how we can improve the Lutron Home Control+ app

[wkearney99]

Hey, no problem, I can see where a lot of functionality is better served in other apps. There reaches a point where the Lutron app isn't going to have 'enough' in it to really tackle a lot of fancier automation scenarios.

But for some stuff the ability to use 'virtual keypads' can be made to work quite well. It came as a bit of a rude surprise to see the android app didn't show the 15-button ones grouped together.

Almost as rude a surprise as the lack of manual sortability for the list of rooms (but that's another thread...)

[Eric H.]

Hey, no problem, I can see where a lot of functionality is better served in other apps. There reaches a point where the Lutron app isn't going to have 'enough' in it to really tackle a lot of fancier automation scenarios.

But for some stuff the ability to use 'virtual keypads' can be made to work quite well. It came as a bit of a rude surprise to see the android app didn't show the 15-button ones grouped together.

Almost as rude a surprise as the lack of manual sortability for the list of rooms (but that's another thread...)

You have the option in the Home Control+ app settings to disable the feature of sorting the rooms alphabetically (which is enabled by default). When you disable this option the list of rooms will be displayed in the app in the order that they are listed in the software. If you want to change the order of the list of rooms in the app you just need to change the order in the software and the app will follow suit. That would get you the ability to manually sort the rooms.

[wkearney99]

When you disable this option the list of rooms will be displayed in the app in the order that they are listed in the software. If you want to change the order of the list of rooms in the app you just need to change the order in the software and the app will follow suit. That would get you the ability to manually sort the rooms.

Not sure this is the case, at least it wasn't a few weeks ago. The ordering in the app was dependent on the order in which you added the devices to the database, not the manual order you might have set up in the PC software. I'd asked this in a different thread and that was the explanation offered.

Has the app changed? Does it now actually use the manual ordering from the program? That'd be great!

Otherwise it'd be more a matter of recreating the database in that exact order. Which is do-able, but seems like it'd require a pretty excessive amount of pre-planning and/or re-doing.

[Eric H.]

The app uses the manual ordering from the program. I verified this over the weekend on both an iOS and Android device.