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by tuzakey 4372 days ago
The Chumby was cool 4 years ago... When the Chumby services started getting flaky as their business died I replaced mine with an Android tablet in a sound dock. The Android tablet is more reliable, has more apps, and doesn't turn into a worthless brick when the internet goes down. I still have the Chumby in a box somewhere, maybe now that services are back up I can sell it and recover some of my cost.
1 comments
georgemcbay 4372 days ago
The use case for chumbies was intended to be different than Android apps in the sense that you have "channels" of rotating information (photos, tweets, whatever) that you can consume in a non-interactive manner (most of the time) which doesn't really map well to Android apps.

While I'm an avid Android user (phone & multiple tablets and even do Android programming as my current "day job"), I still think there is room in the world for the chumby "vision" though if it were to work long term it would be better served by eventually moving the system off of Flash and decoupling the service and apps even more from the existing hardware (it would be better as a software platform that ran on whatever, including (for example) raspberry-pi boards which are in some ways spiritual descendants of the chumby hardware).

disclosure: I worked for chumby until it died.

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madeofpalk 4372 days ago
Well, the reason Android (or iPad) isnt suitable for this is the right app just doesnt exist yet.

Wouldnt Chumby just be more suited to make a $5(expensive!) app for iOS and Android (hell, make it a webservice) that incorporated the previous Chumby feeds?

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georgemcbay 4372 days ago
We did produce a chumby Android app prior to the company going out of business, I think it still exists.

Putting it on iOS was a no-go because of iOS' refusal to support Flash. Even today it would still be kind of iffy on iOS unless it was all based on HTML and JavaScript since AFAIK that's the only way (via UIWebView) that Apple will allow any app to be as dynamic as a real chumby control panel app would have to be, which then becomes a bit of a problem as far as backward compatibility to existing chumby hardware goes since they are pretty CPU/RAM starved for web stuff.

But you're right in that (as I mentioned in the other post) the system would be better served by being a multiplatform software play in the future rather than being stranded on old ARMv5 devices running Flash Lite.

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