Home Zone Beta 7 (working)
Thursday, March 1st, 2007
→ Home Zone beta 7 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)
I’m so sorry I didn’t catch this… 
By the way, you will have to re-configure all actions once after updating. This is not a bug, I just didn’t take the time to write code that translates all actions to the new model. Won’t happen again.
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March 1st, 2007 at 12:01 pm
I have a “-1″ action which is displayed as “Home Zone” when I select it, and a lot of actions have disappeared. I only have :
* Mute system volume
* Set system volume
* Start screensaver
* Pause itune
* UnMute system volume
* -1
I cannot disable password anymore, is it normal ?
March 1st, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Have you tried re-downloading the application? We had some linking problems earlier today, but they have been fixed now, so you should see all actions that have been present in the old version.
Generally, though, you’ll need to re-configure all actions from beta 6 or earlier, as the identification of actions and their options has changed.
March 1st, 2007 at 3:09 pm
I re-downloaded it and it seems alright now, thanks.
March 5th, 2007 at 6:09 am
There’s another program that’s aimed in a similar direction:
http://www.symonds.id.au/marcopolo/
The interesting things are that it triggers based on attached USB devices and the assigned IP address….
Both of which are interesting for me ‘cos I plug my laptop into Ethernet and a USB hub at work, and the DHCP address pool is routable (202.x.x.x) and so unique.
March 5th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
The latest beta seems to have two problems. First, it is ignoring the absence of a named wifi network as a trigger. Second, it causing Finder to hang. On the first, I have named wifii network at home called “AppianWay”. When my home wifi is present & connected I have Home Zone configured to mount several network drives. However, Home Zone is ignoring the condition that the home wifi network be present. It *always* tries to mount the volumes. Even if my airport card is turned off!
Second, Home Zone causes Finder to quit almost every second. As soon as the Home wifi scripts fail, Finder hangs. When I restart Finder, Home Zone restarts & tries to run the scripts & fails & Finder hangs again…
March 9th, 2007 at 8:15 am
Are there plans to make different actions for different (home-)zones possible? I would find this very useful.
March 9th, 2007 at 8:20 am
What exactly do you mean? Each zone can be configured with it’s own actions for enter and leave.
March 13th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Home Zone is amazing! I’ve been looking for an app like this for a while.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a bit of a bug with Home Zone, my PowerBook G4 and my Motorola E398 cell phone. The Bluetooth link between my phone and the computer seems to connect and disconnect completely randomly — without any change in distance between the two. Odd…
My first thought is that something ain’t right with my phone, but other apps such as BluePhoneElite work fine for sustained periods…
Anyone know of issues with this phone/computer/software combination?
March 14th, 2007 at 9:36 am
I don’t think it’s specifically related to your phone model. In what intervals does the disconnect occur? Have you tried increasing the bluetooth scan interval?
March 14th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Hi Jonas,
Thanks for the reply…
I’ll let the pictures do the talking… See:
[url]http://homepage.mac.com/tonyboy/HZ%20Log%20Window.png[/url]
(occured within 10 minutes, without my phone moving a millimetre)
[url]http://homepage.mac.com/tonyboy/HZ%20Preferences.png[/url]
The odd thing is that BluePhoneElite was working without interruption all morning.
Any ideas?
- Anthony
March 15th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
I have exactly the same problem… Otherwise, fantastic app!
March 18th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Amazing little application, and I’m looking forward to seeing it get polished up and finished for release.
In the meantime, I’m having the exact same problem indicated above when I use any interval less than around 30 seconds.
Since I am using it as a proximity detection system to secure my system (among other things), I’d prefer to use a fairly short scan interval, since leaving my Powerbook unsecured for even 30 seconds after I walk away is really not optimal. The freeware “Proximity” app seems to have no difficulty with scan intervals as short as 5 seconds, but it’s also a very simple little app that does only that one thing.
March 19th, 2007 at 2:58 am
One ability that I like to have as a student is the ability to start screen saver and enable the screen saver password and the ability to disable the screen saver password and stop the screen saver when I come back.
Since the stop screen saver action was not configure, I made my own action and it seems to work. Tell me if I am doing this incorrectly:
Looking first at the package contents (right-clicking HomeZone and then clicking Show package contents), I noticed under Contents>Resources>Actions were the “.homezoneaction” files. I simply copied one as a template and then opened the package yet again to take a look at the package’s files.
It seems like there are two main files that make this go. One is the shell script or applescript file located under the Resources folder of the homezoneaction file and the other is the Info.plist that provides metadata regarding the particular action. Modifying the Info.plist file, it looks like that only a few things need to be changed. One is the CFBundleIdentifier, the CFBundleName, the HZActionIdentifier (and it looks like that these can be named whatever). The other is the HZActionAppleScript or HZActionShellScript (depending on whether the file inside the Resources folder is an applescript or a shell script) which should be named to the script’s file name.
Anyways, I made an applescript that just disables the screen saver by issuing the command ‘tell application “ScreenSaverEngine” to quit’ and after restarting HomeZone and adding a new “Enter” action, it seems like this action worked (Though I’m not 100% sure that this isn’t causing bad things to happen). It’s nice being able to walk away from my computer, knowing that it’s completely secured.
I guess the next thing I’m going to try to do is link it with iAlertU so that it automatically enables it when I leave and disables it when I come back.
Anyways, this is a great product and I’d definitely buy a copy of it when it comes out of beta.
David
March 19th, 2007 at 3:48 am
I’d love to see a Set Default printer option in this.
March 19th, 2007 at 9:33 am
Great. I am still writing the guide on how to make your own actions, but you figured it out on your own (and did everything right). However, I suggest you put your custom actions in the ~/Library/Application Support/Home Zone/Actions/ directory (create it if necessary). Otherwise they might be overwritten by future updates of Home Zone.
However, I’m curious if your screensaver script also works for you if there is a screensaver password enabled. For me, the script only switches from screen saver to password dialog, which is the main reason I didn’t include it myself.
March 19th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Well the way I have it set up is that normally I do not have a screen saver password enabled, but when I leave with my BT phone, I use the “enable screen saver password” action before starting the screen saver. That way, if I forget my phone somewhere, I can still log in using the password.
When I enter with my BT phone, I have it set to run the action “disable screen saver password” and then runs my applescript.
Also, thanks for the advice. I’ll go change that now.
David
March 19th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
I think you would be able to create an apple script along these lines:
tell application “Print Center”
set myprinter to printer (printerchoice as string)
set current printer to myprinter
end tell
March 19th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Thanks for the hint, looks pretty straightforward. I think the next release will have this action.
March 19th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Hi there,
very nice solution to this problem. I’ve found this an article featured on digg.com and it’s much more stable and sleek than the original solution in the aforementioned article.
The only problem I’ve got is that from time to time my bluetooth phone doesn’t seem to react quick enough so the “leaving” action is triggered. What I’d like to have is some kind of “second chance” mechanism trying to connect to the bluetooth device again after a short delay before triggering the actions.
Would that be possible or is it a bad idea altogether?
Keep up the good work!
Henrik