Best practices for using Away Mode

[tgauchat (ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)]

@James_Watts

Should it be Away Evening, Away Night, etc? …

The entire Mode concept in SmartThings is well-intentioned but completely half-donkey’d.

Any given household is in multiple “modes” at any point in time (e.g., it is both in Vacation Mode and Daytime Mode and Summer Mode). SmartThings only implemented a single Mode and that’s a huge annoyance.

I’ve complained about this for … well… literally 4 years, I think.

Capability Location Mode (suddenly exists in Capability Taxonomy)

Is it my imagination, or was Capability Location Mode “just” (or very recently) added to the Taxonomy?: [image] And… Is this, by any chance, in response to the Security Concern that I raised a few weeks ago in the Developer Call?: i.e., NB: The solution I suggested on the conference call was that Mode (and/or other semi-global variables) should be stored in any number of Virtual Device Instances, some created by default upon installation of the system, and thus be able to take advantage of the full granular (device instance level) security already in SmartThings. And a helpful side effect of my suggested solution is that it introduces a “clean & consistent” way to support multiple concurrent Modes, each labeled for purpose via use of Virtual Device instance name (e.g., periodOfDay…