Indigo UI enhancement request

Posted on
Fri May 13, 2011 1:25 pm
jshields offline
Posts: 37
Joined: Nov 08, 2003

Indigo UI enhancement request

Recently, due to the applescript component corruption issue, I had to edit lots of my actions. This is really painful because of the number of clicks and dialogs this entails.

I would like to see two changes in the Indigo UI

1 - as a minimum, the tab of the edit trigger dialog should always open in the last state I had selected when I closed that dialog. i.e, if I had the Actions tab selected, then every time I open this dialog, it would default to the Actions tab.

2 - It would be much more convenient if the Edit Actions dialog could be opened as an Inspector window (a palette window that stays forward) whose content would reflect the currently selected trigger. This would allow me to do my series of edits of actions by just opening the Trigger Inspector and then selecting the trigger to inspect in the Home window, edit the action, click Save (you would want a Save and Revert/Cancel button on this window) and then select the next trigger and so on. It would save a lot of clicks and opening and closing of dialogs.

Posted on
Sun May 15, 2011 7:34 am
Swancoat offline
Posts: 503
Joined: Nov 20, 2009
Location: Houston

Re: Indigo UI enhancement request

I wish I could just copy and paste items (or more importantly, multiple items) from one action tab, into the action tab of another trigger action or action group.

http://nerdhome.jimdo.com

Posted on
Fri Nov 18, 2011 5:52 pm
timrowledge offline
Posts: 41
Joined: May 14, 2011

Re: Indigo UI enhancement request

When defining a trigger that turns on things it would be nice to have a button that automatically creates a counterpart trigger that turns everything off. Shouldn't be too hard to work out from the one what the other needs to do….
If one of them is updated it should be feasible to work out if there is a counterpart (a simple naming convention would suffice, surely) and update it the same way - or at least warn the user that something is going to become out-of-sync.

Posted on
Fri Nov 18, 2011 6:19 pm
jay (support) offline
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Joined: Mar 19, 2008
Location: Austin, Texas

Re: Indigo UI enhancement request

@timrowledge - actually, it's quite difficult because most events and actions don't necessarily have a well defined "inverse". For instance, you have a trigger that fires when some event happens, when the trigger fires there are possibly some conditions associated that might keep the actions from firing, then you have the actions themselves. To do a successful reverse trigger you have to:

  1. Figure out what the inverse triggering event is. For device state becomes ON it's pretty straight-forward. For anything else it's not: thermostat temperature has any change, variable changed, plugin device's custom state has a change, etc.
  2. Figure out what the inverse of the condition is. The new hierarchical conditions make that impossible to do programmatially. Same for script conditions.
  3. Figure out what the inverse of every action associated with the trigger is. Again, control light turn on is pretty straight-forward. The rest are much less so: inverse of an Action Group execution, script execution, turn on specific sprinkler zone, send email etc.

Bottom line - it's really not feasible to do. It would take considerable resources just to make the attempt and the outcome wouldn't be significantly better than just creating the inverst trigger yourself. And since most users don't create triggers with any regularity (they tend to be relatively static once set up) there are a lot higher priorities that will have much bigger impact.

Jay (Indigo Support)
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Posted on
Wed Nov 23, 2011 9:47 pm
timrowledge offline
Posts: 41
Joined: May 14, 2011

Re: Indigo UI enhancement request

Understood - I wasn't even hoping that solving the general case could be tried. I have the odd decade or three of experience in the field and know plenty about trying that when anyone with sense runs away screaming :-)
To make my suggestion a bit more general and less computationally scary, I'd love to see some of the simple cases easier to do; there is a lot to do when setting up even a simple Insteon/Indigo system and *anything* that makes it easier to get the basics going would help us when we're new to it. Wizards to guide you, options to quickly build common cases, much better documentation (I don't care who developed it, every bit of software ever written needs better documentation and tutorial material than it has/had), whatever can be thought up.

I completely understand the problems of dealing with all this in a small business so please don't feel I'm berating you!

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