PhoneMyPc- suggestions/comments/fix requests

[Beardface]

I just bought this App last night and I am already in love with it. Awesome job, guys!

I do have a couple suggestions. Is there any way, when I'm in the Live Interact mode, that we could better interact with the scroll bars on any given window? I'd love to be able to long press an arrow or grab and scroll with the slider itself.

Not a deal breaker by any means, I just think it would be awesome if that was able to be done!

 

[coondogg97]

Nope. We are all still waiting.

You have got to be kidding me.

 

[icculusX]

Naaa, updates are slow, so I am hoping this coming one is GOOOOOD.

 

[SoftwareForMe.com]

@Beardface,

We're always looking for better mouse/keyboard input methods, but for now, you can use the DPAD on your Droid to control the mouse wheel. This will scroll the scroll bars, but think of how it works when you are using your PC:
1) The window you want to scroll must be on top and have the input focus
2) The mouse cursor must be over the window

So, the same is true in PhoneMyPC.

Let's say you want to scroll a browser. Open the browser and navigate to some page. Then, tap the page. This will both ensure the window has the focus AND position the cursor over it. Now you can use the DPAD buttons to scroll the page (via the Mouse Wheel).

Of course you can re-map the feature to some other buttons. I usually use the Volume button when I'm doing a lot of browsing or document editing.

 

[Diordna]

Bought it last night out of peer pressure from these forums with a lot of "Best app ever" type thing. I like it a lot actually it's nice, needs that sound update fast and sometimes it's a little slow but guessing thats the internet sometimes.
It's going to be a lot better when I secretly put this on other peoples computers.
I let my brother borrow it last night when I went out with my girlfriend, and he plays WoW on it and I was watching him play it from droid while sitting in Starbucks. It was real choppy though ESPECIALLY on highest quality, but lowest makes it better but nothing like actually watching the screen.

Also during my sitting at starbucks (I was drinking a Monster drink lmao I hate coffee, but um.. thats for a different forum) I turned on wifi and it kept force closing and bad things happen lol. I think it was because I was on a different wifi connection so yeah my bad.

I like this app, I have no HUGE use for it but I can see it helping in life probably later on.
Just PLEASE creators, start working hard on this for us customers paying you a lot (compared to most apps) for it. If you are working hard, work harder. If you're working harder, then make it better than the best app lol
No but real good job on it, I love it. Just need more uses for it now. (secret instal on other computers lol)

I also have to say when I was testing it out on view live I opened a ROM on computer (first mario) and on computer it runs normal but on PhoneMyPC it's frozen picture, then it moves kind of but REAL choppy and bad.
Same with flash or video online, no sound I know but still it shouldn't be that choppy (like hulu vids)
And internet isn't bad at all.


Thanks for the great app though

 

[SoftwareForMe.com]

@Diordna,

Thanks for the thorough walk-through and your thoughts! Let me give a few of my own.

About speed on WOW and others
We wrote PhoneMyPC to provide a 'default' experience that would let you see your PC "as is." That means high-resolution, deep color, etc. This approach has come ramifications, first amongst which is the simple axiom "The more pixels you are looking at, the slower it will be."

It seems obvious, but consider this: if you want to play a game or watch a movie, nothing you do can show you more than 480x854 pixels (on your Droid), because that's the device's native resolution. But, you CAN control how many pixels are captured from the PC screen to fill that box with.

Let's say you have a 1280x1024 monitor.

When you watch a full-screen movie or play a game in full-screen, you will zoom out on your phone so you can see the whole PC screen. Each time PhoneMyPC wants to update what's on your phone, it must gather every changed pixel in that whole 1280x1024 area, shrink it to the proper 480x854 size, compress it and send it to your phone.

On the other hand, if you resize your window on the PC to something nearer 480x854, then PhoneMyPC only needs to capture that many pixels (maximum), does not need to shrink it, and then compresses and sends to your phone.

The end result in both cases is a Droid screen full of PC pixels, but the second approach can be much faster. So in general, run videos and games in smallish windows, similar in size to the screen on your phone.

Finally, network bandwidth is more impactful than any other metric on performance. The good news is that we chose the technologies for PhoneMyPC in light of the fact that they work "well" today, but all major carriers near-term roadmaps show the adoption of 4G, LTE and technologies that could push the current 1 Mb/s speeds well over 10 Mb/s, and PhoneMyPC will be radically faster then.

Broken WIFI
Your report here is odd. I wonder: did it work at all when on WIFI?

I can think of two possibilities:
1) If it didn't work at all on WIFI, they could be blocking the port we need to connect to our servers. This will be fixed in the next release (by using a port that is open nearly 100% of the time).

2) If it worked sometimes, but crashed too, this is almost certainly just a flaky network combined with our bugs. We know our code is not robust when the network is not, and we have many improvements to this for the next release. At a minimum, PhoneMyPC should slow down, or give you a warning, but the current release prefers to crash.

Our work
We are! We worked. Then we shifted to harder. Then hardest, and now we've just stopped sleeping, abandoned our families and we're "one" with our development systems.

Okay, not really, but we really are putting forth 110% effort, and will have another release out soon, then at least two more to follow quickly.

 

[bristolcat]

Our work
We are! We worked. Then we shifted to harder. Then hardest, and now we've just stopped sleeping, abandoned our families and we're "one" with our development systems.

Okay, not really, but we really are putting forth 110% effort, and will have another release out soon, then at least two more to follow quickly.

I sold someone on a Droid just by showing them this app. I mean, it is spectacular in its function and really impresses people when I show it off. After they got the Droid and dug into it themselves, however, they were disappointed to find out that login support isn't a go yet. I told them that the update would come out "soon" in January (per the website). I know you can't commit to a timeframe or anything, but I hope that you understand that the term "soon" can really backfire on you. Just look at the 2.1 fiasco for an example.

Not trying to be too hard on you. I am trying really hard to sell people on your product because it has huge potential. Hopefully the next release will be ready in the next month or so followed by sound support. If I have sound support through Phone My PC on my Droid, that plus Flash would pretty much make my phone the ultimate machine!

 

[Diordna]

@Diordna,

Thanks for the thorough walk-through and your thoughts! Let me give a few of my own.

About speed on WOW and others
We wrote PhoneMyPC to provide a 'default' experience that would let you see your PC "as is." That means high-resolution, deep color, etc. This approach has come ramifications, first amongst which is the simple axiom "The more pixels you are looking at, the slower it will be."

It seems obvious, but consider this: if you want to play a game or watch a movie, nothing you do can show you more than 480x854 pixels (on your Droid), because that's the device's native resolution. But, you CAN control how many pixels are captured from the PC screen to fill that box with.

Let's say you have a 1280x1024 monitor.

When you watch a full-screen movie or play a game in full-screen, you will zoom out on your phone so you can see the whole PC screen. Each time PhoneMyPC wants to update what's on your phone, it must gather every changed pixel in that whole 1280x1024 area, shrink it to the proper 480x854 size, compress it and send it to your phone.

On the other hand, if you resize your window on the PC to something nearer 480x854, then PhoneMyPC only needs to capture that many pixels (maximum), does not need to shrink it, and then compresses and sends to your phone.

The end result in both cases is a Droid screen full of PC pixels, but the second approach can be much faster. So in general, run videos and games in smallish windows, similar in size to the screen on your phone.

Finally, network bandwidth is more impactful than any other metric on performance. The good news is that we chose the technologies for PhoneMyPC in light of the fact that they work "well" today, but all major carriers near-term roadmaps show the adoption of 4G, LTE and technologies that could push the current 1 Mb/s speeds well over 10 Mb/s, and PhoneMyPC will be radically faster then.

Broken WIFI
Your report here is odd. I wonder: did it work at all when on WIFI?

I can think of two possibilities:
1) If it didn't work at all on WIFI, they could be blocking the port we need to connect to our servers. This will be fixed in the next release (by using a port that is open nearly 100% of the time).

2) If it worked sometimes, but crashed too, this is almost certainly just a flaky network combined with our bugs. We know our code is not robust when the network is not, and we have many improvements to this for the next release. At a minimum, PhoneMyPC should slow down, or give you a warning, but the current release prefers to crash.

Our work
We are! We worked. Then we shifted to harder. Then hardest, and now we've just stopped sleeping, abandoned our families and we're "one" with our development systems.

Okay, not really, but we really are putting forth 110% effort, and will have another release out soon, then at least two more to follow quickly.

First off, thank you, I learned something about that pixel stuff, quite interesting

As for the Wifi, when I was in starbucks it gave me a whole different wifi connection, one that I wasn't familiar with, but guessing it's there wifi that I was using??
It NEVER worked when using it, but I think it was just cause I was on a different wifi connection?
It kept force closing and pissing me off, I was going to be sad and refund it but I turned wifi off and it worked again.

I wowed someone today with this app, it was fun.
And I thank you for ditching your families and friends for making this development
lol no but really, thanks for the 110%!
I also just realized pushing the camera button makes a cool little cursor come out which made the app better just because it was another function I can use.

 

[SoftwareForMe.com]

@bristolcat,

No worries on the rebuke; we deserver it, and don't take a word of it personally. We're trying a new development approach--nothing but Engineers--and until we learn a few lessons, there are some disadvantage to go along with the good. We're all engineers, so we're awful at estimates (too optimistic), but, every support email is answered by an engineer rather than a call center. We have no planning team, so we don't have a firm medium or long range roadmap, but since we count our customers as our planners (they decide what to do), we are very responsive to customer requests. Finally, we don't have sales staff, so we are simply terrible at customer relations and about making promises, but, well, maybe the up-side to this one is that we never BS, even though we have been wrong a lot (on time estimates).

We'll get it all straightened out. Customer support as we do has been absolutely amazing!

@Diordna,

WIFI will work, so long as it can connect to the internet, and so long as the port we used isn't blocked. But, sometimes you can connect to a "dead" WIFI signal that has no internet address. In these cases, our software will [currently] crash (a bug).

You must check out our website and read about the input stuff (Interact Live feature). Then, scroll around the settings and look at the bottom 2/3. You can re-map many features to various buttons.

For example, volume up/down defaults to zoom, but since the multi-touch is so great on the Droid, I remapped those buttons to mouse-wheel (scroll up/down) for scrolling my browser.

Be sure to try the "Full Cursor Mode," which by default is mapped to the Search button.

 

[Diordna]

Be sure to try the "Full Cursor Mode," which by default is mapped to the Search button.

And camera button ;p


Thanks for everything!

 

[kennydied23]

I just want to say you guys have a really good app that I use everyday ever since I found out about it a few days ago. I use it with WIFI and on the Highest quality setting and it is almost flawless. If you guys keep up the hard work, you could possibly turn our Droids into true mobile gaming devices. I've tried playing games (Fallout 3, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Cryis) and, surprisingly, it runs pretty good (games only work in Windowed Mode). It's only a little choppy, but a problem is the keyboard doesn't work with games (The button in the D-Pad works, though). Also, just for the hell of it, I tried playing with Dolphin Gamecube/Wii emulator with Mario Galaxy and Twilight Princess. The keyboard does work in these, but you can barely move. If you fix this, it would be possible to play Wii games on the Droid! dancedroid

But you should know I'm not trying to rush you guys. If anything, finish all of the core features and everything your working on to make the app the way you want it before you take this post into consideration. I'm just giving my two cents about possible gaming on the Droid. I love your app and would love to see it handle gaming!

 

[Shadez]

I just want to say you guys have a really good app that I use everyday ever since I found out about it a few days ago. I use it with WIFI and on the Highest quality setting and it is almost flawless. If you guys keep up the hard work, you could possibly turn our Droids into true mobile gaming devices. I've tried playing games (Fallout 3, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Cryis) and, surprisingly, it runs pretty good (games only work in Windowed Mode). It's only a little choppy, but a problem is the keyboard doesn't work with games (The button in the D-Pad works, though). Also, just for the hell of it, I tried playing with Dolphin Gamecube/Wii emulator with Mario Galaxy and Twilight Princess. The keyboard does work in these, but you can barely move. If you fix this, it would be possible to play Wii games on the Droid! dancedroid

But you should know I'm not trying to rush you guys. If anything, finish all of the core features and everything your working on to make the app the way you want it before you take this post into consideration. I'm just giving my two cents about possible gaming on the Droid. I love your app and would love to see it handle gaming!

I dont know what settings your on, but when I use the physical keyboard with it, I hit menu then A-Z keyboard and it works for me.

 

[kennydied23]

I just want to say you guys have a really good app that I use everyday ever since I found out about it a few days ago. I use it with WIFI and on the Highest quality setting and it is almost flawless. If you guys keep up the hard work, you could possibly turn our Droids into true mobile gaming devices. I've tried playing games (Fallout 3, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Cryis) and, surprisingly, it runs pretty good (games only work in Windowed Mode). It's only a little choppy, but a problem is the keyboard doesn't work with games (The button in the D-Pad works, though). Also, just for the hell of it, I tried playing with Dolphin Gamecube/Wii emulator with Mario Galaxy and Twilight Princess. The keyboard does work in these, but you can barely move. If you fix this, it would be possible to play Wii games on the Droid! dancedroid

But you should know I'm not trying to rush you guys. If anything, finish all of the core features and everything your working on to make the app the way you want it before you take this post into consideration. I'm just giving my two cents about possible gaming on the Droid. I love your app and would love to see it handle gaming!

I dont know what settings your on, but when I use the physical keyboard with it, I hit menu then A-Z keyboard and it works for me.

I had no idea what that button was for, I'll definitely try it.

 

[kennydied23]

That didn't do anything for me, what game were you running?

 

[Shadez]

That didn't do anything for me, what game were you running?

No game, thats just how I got the physical keyboard to work for me..