The home automation thing is a penchant of mine, though. We control a lot of things through an iPad interface, but use mainly Wemo stuff. Orvid now seem to be making waves in that area, too, but I'm wondering if the new Apple TV will start the move more seriously.
Just a couple of other thoughts, Ian. I'm not really up on many of the brand names but tend to look for things I consider hackable. Doubtless you will get something more polished but I don't want commitments to a maker (and home computing wise am a 10 -15 years Linux user).
I don't know Apple tv but we use MythTV
https://www.mythtv.org/. I've a feeling that some years back there were a couple of Linux distros that tried to combine that with X10 (a mostly powerline HA - it adds its HA signals to the mains) but I don't know the current situation.
Thinking apps again. I did once for the fun of it/ to show someone a voice activated Android one. Androids voice recognition was interesting. I had to rename hall to corridor for one thing to get it to consistantly understand my command and some of the things it thought I'd said were, hmmm, odd. Not sure I've ever seen myself shouting at a phone in company as practical anyway but a couple of people were interested I could do say "kitchen light on" and the kitchen lights turned on.
I'd probably have liked to have met your father btw. The inventor in our family was probably "uncle Jack" - my mother's uncle. He worked as a chauffer/ mechanic on one of the shoddy mills in Yorkshire but I believe turned down (I guess) Austin or BMC who wanted him. Family rumour anyway had it he was really clever. I only got to meet him the once before he died. He gave me a couple of worn Lagonda big end bearings. I kept them for years.