Heya Guys, some of you may remember me some may not.
Been nearly 2 years since i had to break away from ST, but in the field for a new home and starting a fresh so thought id check in and see if we have made any progress… so few quick questions.
1.) Are third party developers still been alienated by ST staff on the community as a pose to encouraged like the old days?
2.) Has their been any major leaps forward over the last 12 months feature wise (internally) in core ST?
3.) Is the system more reliable and stable yet?
4.) Anything Exciting happened that ive missed like new leaps in community development and ideas, for example past ones been “SmartTiles (ActionTiles) / NST Manager / coRe & Pistons etc etc” (to name a few off my head but not all by any extreme)
In short what im trying to say is, without spending 5 years sifting through the posts of complaints, updates etc are we stilling fighting a loosing battle as a whole or are we making headway for a brighter future.
I would say there is not much encouraging news on this front. Weekly Developer Meetings cancelled over a year ago. No review of community developed Apps/Driver for Publication. Significant change in direction for the platform, that may eventually spell the end for groovy drivers and apps. Jury is still out on what this new platform will mean for the DIYer.
System stability has been the battle-cry for a while. And I believe things were doing pretty well, until earlier this year when everything went bad, again. Numerous cloud server outages in North America and Europe. Possibly related to the ‘new ST platform’ which will be ‘different’ for developers.
Kind of… See comments in #2 above.
For me personally, the single biggest development has been the introduction of a new hub called Hubitat Elevation. All local processing, and can easily run ported ST Apps and Drivers. It was developed by a group of former ST Users - many of the same whom you will remember as ‘being alienated by the ST staff’ 2 years ago.
There has been a good bit of focus on getting a bunch of stuff to run local.
Although not radically different, Core moved to webCore which I find immensely better. Has a nice web enabled UI that has a code window which allows for some pretty complex stuff. It has been very reliable.
In preparation of the tighter integration with Samsung, there is a lot more support for local execution.
Amazon Echo integration is a feature that progresses remarkably with the AskAlexa app.
WebCore (used to be CoRE) development has been so refined that it makes development of many new apps redundant.
There is a community app installer app now that makes installing apps way easier for newbies.
… and yes, I find that stability has improved significantly (in the US) and latency reduced. I do spend way less time on system maintenance than I did 2 years ago.
And my personal favorite… the RemindR app added multi- language support for TTS announcements.
