BTW, re my post above... Here is a little demo video. I go from a freshly installed system to a pretty nice setup in about 11 minutes. The real thing would take a little longer since I'm using mostly simulator drivers for this video. The real drivers (Elk, Omni, Lutron, etc...) would require you to do some configuration, mainly to tell it what thermos, areas, zones, lights, etc... you want the driver to use. But, that's not rocket science or anything.
Once the drivers are loaded, it sets up 'room configuration' where you define what resources (available from the drivers loaded) you want to make available, then you configure a set of rooms and what resources should available to each room and the screen resolutions you want to support. Then we run the generation tool to spit out the user interfaces in the configured resolutions.
http://www.charmedquark.com/Web2/PostImages/4_5Previews/Auto-GenDemo.wmv
For whatever reason Camtasia forces my desktop back to the basic theme, which is why it looks like that. I have to log out and back in to get the Win7 theme back.
Anyhoo, you can see that it can generate a lot of functionality for you fairly easily. Most of this can be used as is. In some cases you might want some user logic to be run at certain places, and those are provided for, though it's not demonstrated in this video since you couldn't see any external hardware anyway. But you can for each room define an action to run upon entry to the music or movie sections, upon selection of a new room to view, and to be associated with power on/off buttons in the music and movie sections. These actions can be used to setup hardware, as required.
As soon as 4.5 goes out, we will go right back to upgrading more drivers to our V2 architecture to support the auto-gen system, and to adding more features to the auto-gen, so that it can do more for you. We just had so many new capabilities already that we had to stop here and get a release out.
