Introducing RTabs

Submitted by ivanwfr on Sat, 01/02/2016 - 15:39

ANDROID + WINDOWS
- Control any number of PC you can access on a WiFi network.
- A Windows server application is listening for connection requests from up to three Android devices running this app at the same time.
- RTabs pages are collections of buttons showing some text stating what they do.
- When you touch one of these tabs, many things can happen. It only depends on all the commands you can throw at your PC.

YOUR CUSTOM DASHBOARD
- These tabs are yours, not a bunch of featured shortcuts.
- Of course, you can import ready made "cheat sheets" for your most used PC applications, and they wont only be simple reminders, a click will have the same effect as typing on your keyboard (SendKeys and Sendinput input level supported.)
- And this feature has been made easy by design as the files that define "RTabs Profiles" are simple ".txt" stored in the shared "emulated/0/Download/RTabs/" folder.

BUILT-IN TOOLS
- First level design is an embedded feature relying on a few templates to start from, using the "Workbench page".
- Designing fancy pages may require some doing with RTabs Designer, a PC app that was used to build the illustrating pages and the embedded documentation.
- Any existing page may be brought back on the Workbench... This means you can start light, make mistakes, and correct them later.
- When saving a Profile (a page) off the Workbench, you use its current name to save changes or enter a new one to fork a clone from there.

SOME FIGURES
To give an idea of what to expect and what may be reasonable limits from actual performance (on my Xperia Z2 tablet):
- Still working but a bit laggy pages may contain up to 500 tabs. (affordable when you can show each of the three wikipedia-derived 450+ colors palette sample pages)
- Displaying Profiles containing around 30 buttons are instant. (linked pages like the DOC chain work great)

MAIN ASSETS
- No Adds! Mainly because it would ruin our job. Also because it is a plague I wont take part in spreading...
- Result, you have to pay for my work on RTabs directly instead of ... through globalization.
- Keyboard input events are those generated by a hardware device driver, not only virtual keys that may be ignored by applications expecting user interaction like most games are.
- Requested commands are relayed through powershell dynamically built scripts ready to support admin-level tasks and system upgrades by nature. (PC Server install-time calls to open Firewall incoming connexion requests from Android devices in one of those and it displays its code and it's execution result. The registration with the Tasks scheduler to launch the server on Windows startup is also a built-in powershell script.)

FEATURED SAMPLES:
- Google chrome keyboard shortcuts
Two working samples include games slash-command-emotes.
- 120 for "The Elder Scrolls Online".
- 140 for "Star Wars: The Old Republic".
The first is working with SENDKEYS, when the second required SENDINPUT to be effective as an emulation of hardware level key events.

NOTE TO THOSE READY TO SPEND SOME OF THEIR TIME AS TESTERS:
Of course, the test version can be downloaded from remotetabs.com for free!

The very last section of the on-line documentation has the necessary links to access those files on http://remotetabs.com :
- RTabs.zip contains 2 Windows applications: RTabsServer, RTabsDesigner
- rtabs.apk contains an Android app currently working on KitKat, Lollipop and Marshmallow.

Those files will be updated nearly every day along with the detailed built-in documentation used as a proof of concept as to what it means to navigate those tabs on the device itself, would it only to be used to browse through structured information.

The online documentation is also the target of the DOC sample profile from which you can navigate by sending keyboard events to a navigator's window having the input focus on the PC.

Tell me what you think of all this and what could be done from there to accommodate some extension that come to mind.

- ivan

Comments

RobertMi

Tue, 09/27/2016 - 19:20

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