The high level flow of user and software interaction can be described with following steps:
1. User login to OpenRemote.org website. Shared credentials with OpenRemote website and OpenRemote managed applications possible. Likely integration points from OpenRemote Manager applications to website features such as Wiki pages and forum threads.
2. Selection of infrared remotes. Integrating with Beehive, the user can navigate and search the Beehive database for infrared remotes they have at home. Navigation can occur on the implemented Beehive web user interface. In addition to the regular Beehive user interface, a user session allowing a selection of multiple remotes from the database must be enabled.
3. User selected remotes should be persisted to user profile. Ideally this should be a shared user profile between Confluence website and/or Crowd SSO solution to enable seamless interaction with OpenRemote managed applications and website, wiki and forums.
4. After remotes have been selected, user is presented with a list of available commands from those remotes. User will select those commands relevant to him for the OpenRemote panel (iPhone, touch panel, web) user interface. It is also possible the user chooses not to use the remote commands as-is but instead composes aggregate macros to present on the OpenRemote panel interface which execute a sequence of available infrared remote commands.
5. Infrared macros. Allows creation of custom commands that execute a sequence of existing infrared commands.
6. Compose panel user interface. The user can select the selected infrared commands or custom macros and place them on a user interface. In the initial iteration the user interface can be composed using a grid layout where buttons are placed. Each button allocates a rectangular area. Advanced user interface elements such as irregular button shapes, Z-order etc. are not necessary for this iteration of UI composer.
7. Composed user macros and user interface elements are stored on user profile. Ideally this is a single profile on the OpenRemote site (see #1).
8. A downloadable package is created on the OpenRemote site for OpenRemote controller (part of ORB) to download and install. The downloaded package will contain configuration elements for the controller: LIRC configuration, required XML configuration to deploy a Java bean middleware wrapper for infrared and XML definition for panel user interface construction.
9. An updated package is downloaded and deployed on OpenRemote Box. The update is triggered either automatically by the ORB (if no profile package exists at all) or triggered by the user with an update/sync operation from a panel user interface.
10. Deploy operation stores an appropriate .lircrc file on the current user home directory and makes user interface definition available on the OpenRemote Box via a HTTP interface. An user interface definition may be a HTML representation to be served for thin web-clients or an XML definition used to render a native user interface (such as a Cocoa interface for iPhone/iPod Touch).
11. User interface is rendered on OpenRemote Box panel. For web-clients this is a HTTP representation delivered by web server running on OpenRemote Box. For native panel user interfaces is a rendering using an XML configuration file provided by ORB.