I exclusively ride on zwift and would find it really useful if the remote player had a little more functionality. Ideally it would be individual gauges, but I would take a transparent borderless background that stays on top even if you interact with the zwift window.
Basically give it the aesthetic functionality of Sauce for Zwift.
This would also allow me to keep the Zwift companion app open on my phone too
I would also very much like to have transparent overlay gauges that I could place on top of any other application I want. However, because the Xert player is a web application and runs inside a web browser, it cannot control OS level window transparency. That would require a native application for Windows / OSX. So don’t expect too much on this front.
It’s possible that using something like Electron could allow the dev team to utilize their web tech stack as a core codebase for building a desktop player. It’s still a pretty big request and commitment to spin up an entirely new application on a different platform.
You could try a third party program to modify your OS’s UI to allow making an application window partially transparent. I don’t have any specific recommendations here, but it is something you could look into.
Of course, sauce is an app. I didn’t think if that.
Browser based “apps” are just the worst thing ever. I suppose the idea was to reduce the burden on developers by writing an ap once (in theory) for a single stable (in theory) platform (arguable). The reality at most places is it was done to easier outsource the “programming” to places like India where every child over the age of 6 knows HTML, etc. I don’t think the latter is the case here but cheap software “engineers” are always a goal (and not without good reason - it’s a highly overpaid group generally speaking).
If you want serious ease of use and the best experience using Xert and Zwift, do yourself a favor and get an Apple TV. Tiny little box you can stick to the wall behind the TV if you want and then use your phone (if it’s Apple) for a remote. Almost no wires, PC’s, Macs, keyboards, or any of that annoying garbage to deal with. It’s next level efficiency.
It would be great if Xert made native tvOS apps as well of course. That’s the modern approach. Browsers are archaic and mostly only good for shopping and reading these days.