Android, non-browser interface

[whitedavidp]

I have done a little Android development over the years and I really make use of my phones for home automation/control use. So it is natural for me to want to do something on the phone for Call Attendant as well - something that goes beyond simply having a home screen icon for the Call Attendant URL. My need to this is increased because only one of my phone extensions can even display Caller-Id (and that one is never the one I am close to).

As a first step, I found/installed/setup the Widgetify app from Play Store. With this app, I can create home screen widgets from virtually any URL. So after a bit of playing around, I have a widget that displays the last 10 calls shown on the Call Attendant Desktop page. Now this is NOT the active web page itself, only a bitmap of what is shown on the page (in an off-screen browser window) that has been cropped for my needs and can be scrolled up/down. This mechanism will not update what is displayed more frequently than every 5 minutes. But that is better than nothing. And, if you tap on the widget, you get options to manually update AND to open the page in a web browser. Pretty cool, I think!

I then added a second widget to display only the state of the Permit Next Call button. So far, we are not using that much. But it seems good to know if it is on or off. And its distance from the call list is too large to get a good result if it is cropped along with the log itself.

Over the years, I have also become a big fan of the Tasker app on Play Store. To call it amazing is an under-statement. With it I have created "tasks" that perform various Call Attendant chores such as toggling the Permit Next Call state (via http) and starting/stopping/re-starting Call Attendant (via ssh). I MAY end up using Tasker (along with another fine app KLWP) to replace the Widgetify functionality I have now into a single, more unified, UI. But that will take some time.

Cheers!

[roycewilliams]

Very cool! Portable dashboard is an attractive use case. I don't have much Android-fu, so I went a pretty minimal route - I made the actual web interface a shortcut on my Android desktop (with a private network connection so I can see it when I'm not at home). I then added a separate, low-tech "alert me when this webpage changes" app to monitor the Calls page.

[whitedavidp]

I must admit I am not up on my private network connection for when I am not home stuff. I have gone out of my way to get stuff I can keep off the internet and on only my LAN. But you are right that I cannot get at it when on non-home wifi or on mobile data. Perhaps here is not the place, but I would appreciate hearing about what you are doing in this regard.

[roycewilliams]

I totally respect your motivations. :D There are multiple ways you can do this, from VPN back to your own network (ideally, Wireguard-based), to an overlay network like Tailscale or ZeroTier (which has a self-hosted option).

[whitedavidp]

Thanks for the pointers. I will try to digest all this.

[whitedavidp]

I mentioned the fine KLWP app earlier. I decided to try and build a better, more unified, Android control panel for Call Attendant. Here it is (so far):

Colors: green = permitted, yellow = screened, red = blocked.

The server control buttons (as I have them implemented now) requires you have an accessible ssh command line client. In my case, I compiled dbclient within Termux and copied it to /data/local. Using this requires root. There may be many other ways to accomplish this. But it follows a pattern I use elsewhere for home automation control.

Also, I added this to my webapp.py to make the Permit Next display to work:

@app.route('/callers/querynextcall')
def Callers_query_next_call():
    nextcall = NextCall(app.config['MASTER_CONFIG'])
    if nextcall.is_next_call_permitted():
        return '1Next call will be permitted.'
    else:
        return '0Next call will handled normally.'