Re: HomeSeer v2.0

[Kevin Hawkins <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The initial launch of HomeSeer 2 offers very little of benefit to most
people. It was a major step for HomeSeer though as it was a total
rewrite in .Net , and they seem to have achieved a reasonable
compatabilty. I think from here on in you're going to see the new
features emerging in sucessive updates. However HS's upgrade policy
isn't clear . With v1 all the updates within the major version number
were free, so I for one had 5 years of updates. Recently however the
plugins have been provided through the updater and are often
individually chargeable and I feel there is a trend by HS and the
other developers to try squeezing a little more money from the users. I
have updated
though as an investment in what might come, $39.95 seems quite
reasonable. We'll see how this pans out.

Surprisingly the new updater doesn't handle updates to the main
application itself. If you liked the realtime device interface that HS
used to have then I'm afraid you lose that to a web (refresh based)
display . There is a general move to using HS as the HA 'service' and it
has enhanced threading capabilities now too. It certainly seems to run
fast & more smoothly for my small setup. When it doesn't work it's a
pain though and some users with more complex older scripts are battling
a bit.

The xAP plugin is already available in a V2 compatible version , and is
still free, allowing all xAP devices to be reflected as HS devices and
any HS device to be presented as a xAP device too - which is really
useful as it expands the library of available devices to xAP and HS. HS
can thus be used as your logic/script engine for xAP, (alternatively xAP
Desktop and xAP FloorPlan both offer inbuilt scripting too and are free)
. HS can be front ended by MainLobby (with a commercial plugin) and by
XLobby using the xAP Xlobby plugin (both free) getting you a realtime
touchscreen interface to HS and xAP should you wish.

Kevin


Paul Gale wrote:

>I see that HS v2 has been released. Anyone using it yet?
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>I’m interested in the voice recognition and wondered how good it is?
Does it use the MS VR engine or it’s own? It also says it can work in
independent mode – but how good is it?
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>Paul.
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