Sorry for being unclear but my post was in reference to John's post, not yours.

And I'm definitely not trying to keep anyone from posting their thoughts. I just thought John's post was a bit confusing for a new user (the topic of this thread) since he is talking about some specific needs, so I wanted to clarify what features he was having an issue with (which turned out to the SQL Logging plugin, I believe).

Yeah, mine was in reference to the other guy also. I appreciate all the info., ideas, help and clarification as I can get. I'm excited to get started and see what I can do.
Thanks again to all the positive and helpful replies!!

matt (support) wrote:Okay, so your complaint is that querying from the SQL Logger plugin isn't as easy as it should be. That is fair enough, and as I've said we have plans to improve that plugin in the future.

Not exactly; you asked for a specific example of something I see happening over and over with respect to people who are NEW to home automation, so I came up with one that I remembered helping with recently; the fundamental problem is that in many cases those who are NEW to home automation don't know Unix or scripting (Applescript or Python) or SQL or object oriented programming. And simply telling these folks to write a query or look up the class definition in the Wiki doesn't help them much without giving them a lot of guidance on where to look for the basics that we assume they already know. As another example, this extends even to many plugins; unless someone is familiar with the standard time formats, trying to get a date and time formatted as "June 19, 2012 at 17:20" is kind of tough even using the Action Collection's Insert Timestamp into variable: The dialog simply says "You may specify a format or the default Python format will be used", which doesn't really give a lot of guidance... you've got a lot of real estate available in the dialog below the custom dialog text box; why not use it to include all the format options, or at least a link to the right place to look in the Python reference? I guess what I am saying is that we tend to forget that not everybody knows what we do, but since you think that only deserves a footnote, I'll shut up about it...

johnpolasek wrote:but since you think that only deserves a footnote, I'll shut up about it...

I didn't say your complaint WAS a footnote, I said it deserved to have a footnote to clarify what specifically you were talking about which I didn't think applied to what a typical newbie user would need (and also which I didn't understand based on your original post).

We can disagree on that point (whether your complaint deals with a typical feature a new user might need) but I wasn't trying to belittle the issue you brought up.

Fair enough on the reference to the Python docs for that one - I'll add the URL to the dialog. See how easy that was? (Note, however, that if you click the help button on the dialog ("?") it'll take you to the help page for the plugin where there's a link to the Python docs.)

We obviously don't really see the need for anyone new to home automation to dig into scripting (much less SQL queries) right off the bat - it just isn't part of most new users requirements. If that was your experience then I think Matt was looking for concrete examples to see if there's reason to somehow make that particular function more accessible. We can certainly discuss what features are appropriate for new users, etc, and we may not agree, but without concrete examples to start the conversation it's a hard one to have.

The other problem that we have is that your comment doesn't seem appropriate on this thread - the OP's questions were this:

• Is indigo as versatile and advanced as some of the other DIY programs.
• Is there a limitation in hardware?
• As a complete newbie, where do I reference to start mapping out the most complete and reliable network?

Your post, while perhaps a reasonable statement, doesn't help with the OPs questions and in fact probably caused even more confusion.

We like feedback, and with some concrete examples of issues we definitely consider adding features (we have a rather large list of said feature requests that we constantly have to prioritize). But voicing frustrations without specifics on inappropriate threads isn't the way to provide constructive feedback. And it's also important to realize that your needs aren't necessarily those of other users - we have a significantly larger user base than those who hang out on the forums and most of those guys have never felt the need to do any scripting.

So, thanks for the feedback and if you have any more concrete examples of things you think could be done better feel free to let us know - it's usually best to post them on the Indigo 5 Features forum.