Tyler, you really run ST, so we know we can take you at your word
Of course, as Tim said, Iām in the donāt tell me, show me (and then release it to us, damnit) phase.
What upsets me is when good developers go quiet because of the lack of communication. Itās comments like, if you donāt like it, go away and why are you still around if you arenāt happy.
I told Ben along time ago, donāt worry about vocal developers screaming for things, we want it allā¦ Worry about the fact that if I go quiet, that means Iām gone. Weāve lost so many great developers to the silence and stagnation. Worse weāve lost some to the bully tactics some take when they speak up and I wonāt be pushed aside for demanding better tools, better engagement with the devs and holding people accountable for their promises.
Anyway, glad to hear from ya STārs, mainly just to confirm you folks are still employed
That is definitely true of many forums. However, because of the versatility and power of the SmartThings platform, these forums have attracted an unusually high number of people who actually make useful things and contribute to the community.
New devices come on the market bringing new challenges and people who enjoy solving problems often work together on these forums to get those new devices working with the SmartThings platform. All of that in turn leads to a community with a very high percentage of expert users helping other people solve real life issues.
Just take a look at the quick browse lists in the community ā created wiki. There is an amazing variety of projects and solutions there, and many examples of people (including SmartThings staff) helping each other.
Plus all the people who help others with device selection or wiring questions or integration options.
Very little in the way of demands for instant gratification or impossible requests. Instead, it is a surprisingly large community of āroll up your sleeves and get the work doneā people.
Indeed, I think the highest level of frustration has come not over features that were promised and not delivered but over stuff that was working on Monday, representing a great deal of effort on the part of many people, that then stopped working on Tuesday because of undocumented platform changes. The frustration of problem-solvers, not those who are impossible to please.
It is easy to dismiss the noise on the forums for many products for exactly the reasons you mentioned. But I think very little of that criticism applies to these forums and I think SmartThings deserves the credit for that, both in the platform they created and in the employees that have participated here. They have an offering that attracts developers who appreciate hard work and enjoy sharing their own efforts with others. That is both unusual and valuable, and I think we should give it the credit it deserves.
Oh I agree. I use allot of developer DTH and smart apps AND made my experience much better and even paid lifetime for Rboyās webpage. I hate I have to manually check it though lol. And I hope it continues. And I agree this may have more then the 10%. But delivering a product for less then a hundred dollars and no fee is fairly new and even some security systems have issues and you pay a monthly fee for them. No if I paid a monthly fee to smartthings I would have a little different attitude Just saying there seemed to be some very negativity in this when at least mine works 99% of the time and the other support emails are quick or I figure it out myself. Gives me something to do.
Thanks for chiming in, Tim, and good to hear that. Iām sure thatās what youād like to do, but I just donāt think you guys are the masters of your own destiny in this case. With founders gone, things are going to change rather quickly. I just donāt see a business case to support third-party developers. Itās expensive. Thereās no money in Smart Apps, we all know that. It made sense when you had less than a dozen developers in house. But now, that you have over a hundred, why bother? Just to attach an āopen platformā gimmick to the marketing stack? Letās be honest, ST has never been a fully open platform. And over time itās become even more restrictive. Just a few examples: (1) Thereās no way to add third party cameras; (2) Thereās no way add third-party Smart Apps to the Dashboard; (3) Thereās no way to subscribe to SHM events; (4) Thereās no way to run third-party apps locally. So there you have it, all the new features introduced in V2 are closed from the start.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
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Well, Iām just gonna take the good consumer standpointā¦ Cause no matter what, thatās exactly what I am to ST, a consumer.
My investment in this company is a huge amount of expensive timeā¦
ā¦ But Iām going to ride this wave as long as I canā¦ And when it crashes Iāll jump on the next one.
your investment in smartthings or devices. My investment in smarthings is about $500 but if you count the other devices I have bought those are about $1500-$2000. Like wall switches, sirens and cameras.
Holy smokesā¦I brought my pop corn and got comfortable on my chair, but then someone made the post vanish. We are getting into the sci-fi field here. Thanks for saving a piece of history, Jasonā¦
Yep! Weāre still here too! I have been a little absent the last few weeks (had to take some personal time) but, as Tyler and I said, we are working tirelessly to make the platform ready for development on a truly awesome scale. Waiting sucks, and I hate that I have to ask you to wait, but, we are really excited about some of the things we are working on.
Ok, seriously, will some Smarthings developer monitoring this thread answer this questionā¦When will Smarthings support the Samsung SmartCam Plus that is sold at Costco? Some developer give me a dateā¦and hit that date. āSoonā and āQ1 2016ā were the answers when I bought the cameras on Black Friday last year.
i took the summer offā¦ i am now retiredā¦ i am backā¦ b ut actually my two locations have been working really well save the hue hubā¦
that is on my list ā¦ the hub goes offline every day or two or sometimes multple times a day.
it is because it is on a switch behind my routerā¦ i cannot put it on my main router as they want as i have public ip address and the main comcast router is in bridge mode going to a cloud os router ā¦
anyway long story short if you power off and on the hue bridge it works for awhileā¦
i now put it on a zwave swith and will write notifications into the hue bridge to notify a smart app to reboot it when it senses it offlineā¦ probem solved.
next up is the modification to the garden hue app i promised so you can disable and enable each color. and sent a couple of custom colors.
that way you can have only certain colors for holidays.
overall reliablity is pretty good latelyā¦ havent had to remove and re-add routines or muck with the scheduler stuff in a long timeā¦
