I couldn't even focus on the product after seeing this ridiculousness:
Why would a phone have both capacitive navigation buttons and onscreen navigation buttons? Are they intentionally trying to be funny?
Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone
21–30 of 91 posts
Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone
#22Like the Amazon Dash Button, this is a great reminder of how hardware is still useful in the age of touchscreen interfaces.
Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone
#23Get more netflix to your life !!
Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone
#24It's really great to see a company's engineers given the time and resources to do some fun tech project like this. Sometimes it seems like unless a project is about directly increasing revenue, its incredibly difficult to get buy-in from management. These projects are great for culture.
[deleted]
Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone
#25It's really great to see a company's engineers given the time and resources to do some fun tech project like this. Sometimes it seems like unless a project is about directly increasing revenue, its incredibly difficult to get buy-in from management. These projects are great for culture.
Is it really just a fun project? Or is Netflix trying to use this as the nose of the camel to get into the house automation business? I've always thought house automation was cool, but a lot of trouble and likely to wind up a waste of my time and effort once I stop using it in three years because whatever standard I was using became obsolete. But if Netflix can start automating my house one bit at a time and slowly s…
Step 3 is 'Select the Microcontroller'. I don't understand how they plan for this to be a pure profit driving activity.
Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone
#26Reminds me of something I built:
http://garyroumanis.com/2015/03/15/TVRemote-app/
Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone
#27A number of years ago I made a project that let me do this for ESPN using IR (Ken Sherrifs awesome library) and x10 units. Rather than a physical button I just had a shortcut on my phones home screen.
Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone
#28It would be cooler, easier, and would yield better battery life to reprogram an Amazon Dash Button [1] to do this. Most Samsung TVs can be controlled from the network side, as well as with an IR remote.[2] Of course, the Netflix button just brings up power and puts you at the Netflix menu. At that point, you need another device to tell Netflix what you want. Authorized Netflix-compatible TVs already have a Netflix bu…
This all sounds great -- until, for example, you are trying to eat a snack while also watching TV. Or one of a dozen other things where the automation gets in the way. Or, equally worse -- it's not perfect. Sometimes the lights don't change, sometimes there is a delay (so user presses the button multiple times) and suddenly everything catches up and curtains are closing and opening and closing and opening..
Any of these cause WAF to go to zero, at which point, you rip it all out.
So many times when it comes to home automation, otherwise rational software developers forget what people actually want to do, and skip to what the technology makes possible but doesn't actually make anything easier.
Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone
#29Can only be called a Chill Switch.
Re: Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone
#30Maybe Orwell's vision wasn't accurate. The title suggests Huxley got it right.
epsilons are fun, epsilons like to play and run