iOS app

I’m happy to help out where I can. Limited programming skills. But happy to help where I can. Using a emonpi in my home with a solar PV setup.

Cool! If you’ve got an iPhone/iPod/iPad then testing would be definitely appreciated. If you fancy getting into coding, let me know and I can help you get set up.

I’m on my way with a basic MyElectric app.

It pains me that we have to write these 3 times - WWW, Android and iOS. And then there’s the massive duplication between MyElectric, MySolarPV, etc.

The right way to go long term is everything in Javascript, using React, so that it can run on WWW (vanilla React) and mobile (React Native). But that’s a big undertaking, which I don’t have time to do.

I’m away from my computer for a few more days. But have most Apple gadgets to test it on. Have had a look at xcode in the past.
Looks like a cool project

I got a bit further today…

The styling needs to be done for sure, but this is basically a straight clone of the Android My Electric app. Funnily enough, the charting library I’m using is a direct port of the same charting library that’s used on the emoncms Android app. So getting things looking similar is pretty easy!

Just a few more tweaks on that and it’ll be usable. Things that need doing:

  • “Use today” is clearly not right - it’s just the current value of the kWh feed. Just testing!
  • Bar chart needs a little bit of styling to get the nice M T W T F S S in the bottom of the bars.
  • It needs to auto-update. And probably a refresh button in the top right.
  • It needs buttons to change to 1 hour, 8 hour, 1 day, zoom, pan, etc.

But we’re getting there!

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It’s looking good Matt!

Paul

for what it is worth - I like the nice clean white background like in the first post. I am personally not a fan of dark backgrounds. Just my 2 cents worth as an armchair quarterback / back seat driver! :wink:

I have been thinking that maybe we could do something similar to the dashboard editor that is more targeted at full screen/mobile/tablet display.

Then just the rendering of these would have to be ported to the different platforms.

Hi Matt, Like what doing, personally I do not use iOS but I was interested by your original approach which looked more like the mainstream or full emoncms feed page than the emoncms apps. Is that a route you intend to pursue further or are you now going for the emoncms apps as the main feature set?

With regard to the MyElectric and MySolar duplication, I wanted to mention some change in the pipeline for the AndroidApp that I would also like to add to the emoncms web apps, so you may want to concider them here too?

Whilst the MySolar app is quite specific to the overall picture (but could have alternatives eg your MyDiverted app or hydro/wind etc) and would usually (but not always) only be needed once in any account, the MyElectric app is a simple report based on a single power&energy feed pair, This could be used for several different feed pairs to report a multitude of different things from the more obvious electricals (eg EV charging or hot-tub heating etc) but also as “rate & total” pairs, other instances of “MyElectric” could also report gas, oil or water consumption or even rainfall etc too.

It would be good to collaborate and move the AndroidApp, emoncms apps and the iOS app forward together for this, if you have any interest in making “myElectric” a group of user defined (freetext title/2x feeds/1x colour each) pages rather than a single page, I think many users would find this extremely useful.

Android programmer to expand MyElectric app

We are also in the process of making the AndroidApp multi account too, but I understand that maybe a less appealing feature as many users only have a single emoncms account.

I tend to agree. I just wanted to make it the same for now. Although it doesn’t really fit in with the iOS way. So I think it does need to change.

Totally agree. I would love to add something like that eventually!

YES YES, and YES. Any thoughts on best ways we can collaborate? Should we have some place where we discuss things? And maybe come up with a combined roadmap? This goes with your other points. It would be great to share a roadmap so that we can keep track of where everything is going so as not to diverge, and also share in the thoughts of each app.

It’s part of my design from the start for iOS. It’s not there just yet, because it’s not top priority, but it’ll work eventually :smiley:

I actually like having an open discussion in an easily accessible and central location, like here on the forum and then raising specific tasks/bugs/todo’s etc as issues on GitHub, that keeps the chit chat out of the “issues” and keeps everyone involved in the discussions rather than developing behind closed doors, from the forum, issues can be linked rather than spreading one discussion across many locations. In this instance though there are at least 3 repo’s (iOS, Android and web apps) in play and with multiple contributors this could easily double/triple.

Since we will not all get access to multiple emoncms repo’s to make use of the issue tracking labels, assignment and milestones I could set up a dummy/temporary github repo just for some central issue tracking during development, that way we can all have some access.

Yeh, having the discussion on here is fine. I just wondered if we should ask for a separate section? Or actually, we can just use a tag. I tagged this post with “mobile” for example. I’ve not used Discourse much, but maybe there’s a way to subscribe to a tag so that interested people can be notified when there’s a mobile discussion going on?!

If you click on any “mobile” tag you will get this page, on the right near the top, directly under your profile pic/button, there is a dropdown offering these options

so it is possible to get notified, perhaps an “appscollaboration” tag would be less likely to get used for general mobile related topics and could include the emoncms web apps too?

EDIT - See the appscollaboration tag.

All sounds great :thumbsup:

@pb66 feel free to make a ios and AndroidApp sub-forum section to Emoncms / mobile forum if you think that would be best. Or just keep everything is a single forum and use tags. I have no particular preferance.

Sweet. This is a great idea. And I’ve subscribed to that tag.

Just jumping in to say Hi!
I’m the developer doing some work on the android app at the moment - so far making it multi account, but starting to think about multi-feed. Would be great to collaborate and keep the apps consistent as much as possible. Unfortunately I don’t own any i-devices, so can’t try out your app : (
Would be interested to know a bit more on how you navigation between feeds goes on your app?
Tamsin

Hey @tamsin!

Yes it’d be great to collaborate!

On the switching between feeds - are you meaning switching MyElectric instances? Currently I’m veering away from the iOS app having the “apps” per se. I am currently focusing on the app showing a list of your feeds, then you can drill into each feed and view a chart of it, and then save those charts. My idea is to be able to save pages of charts eventually, which is essentially what the MyElectric is.

I don’t have multi account yet, but my thought is that would be a layer above what I have right now. You’re always logged into one of the accounts, but you can switch between them, add new ones, and remove them.

I’m being a bit slow but I’m taking the opportunity to dive into making a watch app as well. So it’s taking a little bit of time!

Thanks for the reply! I’ve done multi-account pretty much as you’ve said. At the moment it shows one set of charts for the active account (you choose the feed for each in the settings). I’ll have a play with saving multiple pages and see how I get on (I’m fairly new to both android and emoncms!) I’ll let you know how it goes.

I would like to collaborate too.
I would really like to turn the energy app into a widget for the lock screen …

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Yeh a today widget was part of my plans for sure.

I’ve hit a bit of a wall but I plan to get back to it soon.

You want to help then? What’s your expertise? Let’s chat!

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