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Unity Systems Home Manager Support

unitysystemshomemanager.com

48 pointskappuchino30 comments

My favourite part about these is that if you take these interfaces, anti-alias the fonts and add some colours to the UI widgets, you get a modern-day interface. Minus the animation, so probably faster.

40 years of UX "development" and we've eventually come back to where it all started, except slower. Yay.

It's almost like they integrated product design with usability and other human factors...all in one fell swoop. This smacks of brilliant solo design, if not a very, very tight team.

If YouTube comments are to be believed...

> I'm the guy who designed that whole touchscreen (hw, sw, fonts, html+pdf-like markup, menuing system) as a kid a couple years out of college. I left the startup before they got into production, so have never seen a full system in action... very cool to see your vid! Looks like we both live in INLAND NW area. If so, might there be a way to come by and see it sometime?

In any case, this is incredibly cool (and I can't quite shake the feeling that the UI design was inspired by one of the early Alien movies).

Even better screens from the UI: https://imgur.com/a/Jb6jW

This gives off a retrofuturistic feel that reminds me of Alien Isolation. I kinda want to see how it would look like in practice attached to a modern Home Assistant system. Maybe that's my excuse to learn ncurses and TTY programming?

> reminds me of Alien Isolation

Probably because the interfaces there were based on the interfaces of the sentry guns of Aliens.

Get an old TV and make it? Though I guess you'd still need the touch interactions.

The sentry guns in Aliens used monochrome amber LCD screens.

You can get pretty close with a modern LCD and something like https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term.

Reminds me of Fallout terminals, as well. And that's a good idea. If I ever have a Home Assistant, it's gonna have Fallout-terminal interface.

notcurses: https://youtu.be/dcjkezf1ARY

Man I want this. Maybe not the old power control hardware, but certainly the interface.

Here's a video demonstrating the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BHIknNa6Eg

The whole green retro terminal style display and graphics reminds me of a cool movie prop I'd never thought would exist in real life.

"The 80ies" called and said you can just call them the 80's if you live in the 20th century. Or the 80s if you live in the early 21st. But definitely not the eight-ease-ease,

They also did all your coke, bought Enron, and totally dissed that ozone hole thing, dude! Totally wrong.

My bad. English is not my first language, but my favourite ;-).

Was the hole the ozone layer debunked?

No, it has healed. Regulation of CFCs worked.

https://twitter.com/CopernicusECMWF/status/12532730352489758...

It's been a long time since I studied it, but at one point it was known that many Asian and developing countries where ignoring the cfc ban. China was importing massive quantities in the 2000s and it was hard to know exactly how much they where emitting.

I've heard stuff like that, too. Seems like parties subject to the ban accounted for enough CFCs to do the job despite China and probably others.

Would there have been an underlying OS (if there even was one)?

It reminds me of the first Buick green screen UI.

(1) https://www.techeblog.com/1986-buick-riviera-touchscreen-gra...

IBM have invented touchscreens with a dedicated pen (I ignore the name) around late '60s, decades ago we have seen https://youtu.be/7jPKEyM44GU the point?

Well, it's simple: 99% of today high tech came from PUBLIC or at least publicly founded research from after WWII to first '80s ALL THE REST is just popularisation, ingenerisation and added crap to ensure some private party profits carefully designed not to give any power to users. It's about time we came back to a public research for public progress...

I'd pay to have the same exact interface installed in my home today. I imagine using that kind of touchscreen felt like butter compared to a modern Honeywell thermostat.

Yeah, I don't know why modern UIs are so laggy. I have a 2-year-old Sony TV that keeps freezing (won't even turn off), Netflix UIs have a 1 second lag, etc.

A fucking TV! This is not the future I was promised.

> Netflix UIs have a 1 second lag

We have found the enemy, and his name is JavaScript. Even on a fast laptop or desktop CPU, you can very readily feel the difference between Electron apps and e.g. Qt apps written in C++. But on the business side, using native code is a fair bit more expensive, so we use slow chunky “maximize development speed at the user’s expense” frameworks instead.

Scale that down to the anemic Cortex A CPUs in TVs, and then stack 3 years of software updates that target the current gen TV instead of the 3-year-old one and… Yeesh.

Somehow my super old Roku has maintained about the same performance over its long life. It’s got to be coming on 10 years now. It has never been snappy, but it’s been reasonably tolerable and has been very hassle free. Dunno what they’re doing different!

So many UIs are basically HTML rendered pages and rerended the entire screen in each paint.

And on a slower chip like found in a TV it’s really noticeable.

Add in latency from Bluetooth, etc and you get all sorts of mushy experiences.

I am having trouble getting a read on their intention with the aesthetics here. They are DELIBERATELY showcasing 80's era interfaces including green-screen terminals on their corporate home page.

Just trying to figure out if this is...

a) An ironic put-on of some kind

b) Maybe they're a company that continues to service this equipment for a customer base of aged moguls that had this installed in their grand estates 40 years ago, so they decided to get a web-presence (after finding someone to translate their Hypercard deck to a website).

b) They're playing it straight and trying to show that this stuff is a "long-term" solution-- with the argument that if this stuff is still running after being installed 40 years ago that, of course, it will be running 40 years from now?

On the other hand looking at the fragmented state of home automation right now, one has to wonder if there's a profound lack of vision that was lost in the last 30+ years. Perhaps it just goes to show that a well-thought out system design can last a long time almost regardless of what technology was chosen.

The home automation market right now looks like a sketchy hot mess of surveillance capitalism and blatant rent-seeking. If you want something that actually respects you and your household without ulterior motivations and you can't "roll your own" maybe something like this is the ticket for you?

> I am having trouble getting a read on their intention with the aesthetics here.

HN users is not the target audience. It is not intended to be dissected and pulled apart for analysis and profit. Sometimes things are because they were.

> ...not intended to be dissected...

Well, sure, "not intended" but that's what happens.

It's OK though. It's refreshing to see stuff like this. I admire that someone will still provide support for such old systems even if folks like me don't understand why.

There's some very compelling positives to something that can keep running for so long and which doesn't "phone home" to a corporate master because "its home" is where it is installed.

They are last remaining support company for the system, as well as provide upgrades that reuse the original wiring and components.

The screen shots are of real, actual system, not some Photoshop visualisation, so at least they are honest.

It's (b).

There's a link at the top of the page to a very high end home automation/technology company, running a small website for owners of what are likely expensive homes makes lots of sense as lead generation.

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