Getting Started - What's popular or cool? SmartApps, Device Types, 3rd party apps, IDE, etc

I’ve been in the community for about 6 months now and I’m fairly familiar with the majority of what’s new and what’s going on here in the community. Popular SmartApps, popular device types, popular 3rd party apps and what not. But when I first came here, it took me a LONG time to catch up.

I posted something a while back when I first joined the community that has since become a good source of what devices are popular and their descriptions and what not. That was SUPER helpful for me to get me started and hopefully it’s helped others:

There are A LOT of really cool and talented people on here making some REALLY cool things.

The idea here is, what’s new and popular? What’s everyone talking about. What are the must haves? I remember when I first started, it took me at least a few weeks before I even found out about Rule Machine, and now it’s my lifeline of my Smart Home setup.

I know there is an unofficial SmartThings wiki, but most don’t know about it, to be honest, I just found out about it yesterday, and it’s not always perfectly up to date. I noticed it is missing some things.

Here’s some links for things that have helped me a TON, these links are both for advanced users and beginners:
- Unofficial SmartThings wiki: http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/
- SmartThings IDE for US: https://graph.api.smartthings.com/
- Developer / IDE Documentation: http://docs.smartthings.com/
- Zigbee Cluster Library (ZCL) http://www.zigbee.org/download/standards-zigbee-cluster-library/

Community / 3rd party SmartApps that have made huge impacts in my Smart Home setup. I’m not going to include all of the links because information can be found in the wiki (above) or by searching the forum for more info and their Release posts:
- Rule Machine (no longer supported, if you want the code, you’ll have to find it / get it from someone) I have it here because I still use it and will continue to until CoRE is out of beta. My setup is stable and I’m happy for now.
- SmartTiles - SmartThings Dashboard - Search link
- Nest Manager / Nest Automations - Search link
- LANDroid / LANnouncer (name was changed) - [Website] (http://www.keybounce.com/LANdroidHowTo/LANdroid.html) - Search link
- CoRE (Community Rules Engine) - Search link - not yet using, but I see based on other people working on it, that it’s going to be extremely useful

Recently Started looking into these, so I don’t know how well they work yet, but thought I would include them to save for myself for later:
- Alexa Helper - Search link
- Ask Alexa - Search link
- VLC Thing - Search link
- Big Talker - Search link

7 Likes

Sounds like a great idea for a thread!

Three links that people might find helpful/interesting.

First, this is a “getting started” link that covers a lot of different things:

Next, the custom code FAQ for those who aren’t sure just what using custom code would involve:

And finally, for something new, we’ve very recently added a page in the community – created wiki that allows you to quick browse the sections of this forum which have community-created smartapps and device type handlers. So now if you just want to take a look at SmartApps from the community-created forum section for lighting, or security, or irrigation, etc you can find those quickly. :sunglasses:

And for some really cool stuff, take a look at the quick browse list for "alerts."There’s a lot of very interesting stuff there, both old and new.

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Quick_Browse_the_Community-Created_SmartApps_Forum_Section

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Welcome… and, well, the whole point of a wiki is that “anyone” can edit it. I wish it used markdown format (the same as the forum), or HTML, but, whatever…

If something is missing, y’all are supposed to just add it!

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I know, but most of the things I notice that are out of date are not things that I personally would fill in. Things like, certain SmartApps are out of date. I might use them, but I don’t know them well enough to add change information, version numbers, screenshots, etc. The developers of those apps really should keep them up to date.

Most of the developers keep their code in github with a link from either the forum or the wiki over to github, so you should always see the most current version there even if the description with the link isn’t up-to-date.

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Oh okay, that makes sense. I’m still learning GitHub and getting used to using that stuff. I use version control / SVN at work, but I had never used GitHub prior to SmartThings before.

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