After a day or so of messing with the Chumby, looking into the various development options and figuring out how the device is best (for my purposes) used.
Two factors have made me drop some avenues of exploration and reexamine/update some old familiar tricks.
First, the size of the device, the input issue and the overall want to be able to control it from where ever I happen to be rather than where the device is as left me looking less at widgets and more at services. It comes out of the box with a small yet functional web server and most of the functionality of the device can be gotten to from scripts triggered by and feed info from interaction with the web server. This brings me back to where I got off the professional dev carousel, yep..cgi, scripts, markup and duct tape.
Second, the fact that this is a full on linux device that simply uses flash widgets to be more consumer friendly lets me focus on treating this as an open ended "what ever tool works" problem and not a reason for having to get into flash development. This is a good thing as the future of flash for such devices is in serious question but the future of Linux is not.
What does this mean? Mostly it means I will be working out solutions that will work on the Chumby to make it do all the neat things I want it to do and that the interface for those things will most likely be web based. Any browser, on a desktop, smartphone or GoogleGlasses, will be able to tap into whatever I work out. My use of flash widgets will be minimal.
More as it happens.
#chumby #ducttapedev
