Feature Request: Label on tile "previews" in things view

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

Hi shroom! – Welcome to our humble Community!

@shroomzofdoom

UI improvements should be coming several times a year or they are not listening to their customers.

I personally disagree with “overly frequent” updates to any software, perhaps because I’m a bit “old school” and come from environments with full release cycles rather than Continuous Integration.

Everytime I see “Update Available” in my list of Android Apps or my Firefox or Chrome version, I get a tiny anxiety attack that something is going to break and/or something part of my routine interactive flow is going to change in a major way. I still run Office 2007 – definitely not Office 365.

But … I am adapting and starting to see the value; especially for bug fixes (hopefully well tested for side-effects!) and for fast deployment of “uncontroversial” UI improvements and incremental added / isolated features.

If you browse the history of “Label on Tile Previews” scattered throughout this Forum (I’ve brought it up 3 or 4 times, and have others … January 2014 example: SmartThings Icons - #11 by genekend); you’ll find that SmartThings considers this to be a debatable (i.e., controversial) and/or ignorable lower priority issue.

We really don’t know why this is the case.

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It is also notable that you should mention “custom icons”:

@shroomzofdoom

Would it kill them to let us create our own custom library of things icons?

There is a thread that implements that via workaround (a lot of clever hackers and developers here), but the current tail end of the thread is coincidentally dangling with a post in which I raised this question…

Updated: Device Name instead of an Icon, here's how I did it

@Ben: Is there a compelling reason to not have all Device Types (including all existing SmartThings Types) use “canChangeBackground: true” and “canChangeIcon: true” … please? Perhaps there are some rare examples where the official trademarked image must be locked in place, but … well, I can’t even figure out why that would be necessary. …CP / Terry.

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In other words, you’re not alone.

I cannot emphasize enough, however, that a lot of us (and I’m speaking not as any sort of official leader or representative – “us” is just a visible subset of the Community), are very appreciative of even the opportunity to vent our concerns in a public forum and have felt (and experienced) that prominent members of SmartThings (including @Alex - Founder/CEO, @Ben, @Urman, @Jim, @Tyler, …) listen and hear what we are saying. Certainly, they aren’t visibly acting on quite a few of the requests or problems they hear, but, they do listen and hear, which is more than we can say for most corporations out there, in this industry, and others.

…CP / Terry.