@bravenel - Thank you for your response. I’m curuious on your thoughts below.
The more I think about what you say that makes complete sense but exposes what I view as a fundamental flaw or missing feature within the deployment of phrases in the application.
Phrases, in regards to hello, Home in some manner replace the concept of modes, but give you some additional much needed push features which modes don’t do. I’m not entirely sure why they kept modes / phrases as individual items because if you design your system to use modes but trigger items using phrases it’s very easy for your system to get out of sync. It’s almost as if they kept legacy features around while only partially integrating future features. Working in software I’m constantly battling this issue internally with my engineers. Anyways - I digress.
Example:
I want my home to know “I’m awake” and if I want apps operate in a certain manner when “I’m awake” I have to set a mode. But if I want to trigger a bunch of actions as soon as “I’m awake” I have to use a phrase. Now It’s kind enough to allow me to set a mode from the phrase so I only need to trigger one item (i.e. the phrase) and I kill two birds with one stone. But…
In addition I want the ability to determine the phrase I want to go to based on what my current phrase is (i.e. mode). This isn’t particularly difficult, I just capture the mode as well as the phrase, check against the mode and send a command using the phrase, however, to do this I have to request both mode and phrase for every pair, this isn’t the best user experience for my app, actually it’s some what of a pain (I’ll explain in just a moment).
Also, states unlike apps, have the added benefit of not trigger events over and over again if they are already set state you are attempting to complete. This is NOT true of apps (unless programmed). So if “I’m awake” mode is set and a phrase is run and then I detect an action that would send my house into the same mode/phrase the app sends the command. STs is smart enough to send a warning saying you are already in that mode (i.e. don’t do anything) but hello, Home isn’t and attempts to run the app. Good news, the sub app is smart enough to say everything is set the way you want so I’ll stop but that’s after 1-5 notifications explaining the situation have been triggered within the hello, Home screen. hello, Home becomes basically useless because every time there’s motion in my house I get a lines regardless of change in overall state (i.e. I see 100 I’m awakes, 100 homes, etc. etc).
Workaround: My fix for both is requesting the phrase and mode during installation of the app. I then use mode to determine what phrase to run or if to even run the phrase (i.e. it’s already set to that, ignore the request). This is easy enough EXCEPT I have 6 modes and 6 phrases, now I have to do double the steps when configuration the application. That sounds like a stupid complaint but it still is a bad user experience and I hate designing applications (especially ones I have to use) with a user experience that drives me nuts.
Long term fix: I might have to design an app to do this for me but I think STs should like at doing it. Almost everything in the world can trigger a phrase out of the box EXCEPT a mode change. Let me change a phrase based on a mode change and all of this goes away OR store the current phrase within a variable and let me call that variable.