Next Developer Call will be on 04/08/2015 - Guest : Jeff Hagins

General Discussion Groups & Events
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Hi All!

Last Developer Discussions , I mentioned that we will have our Developer’s Platform team on this call in two days (from this posting). However, I bring you a very special guest instead: Jeff Hagins, CTO of SmartThings. Please have your questions listed here for him, as he will be sharing the roadmap, being real- and talking about what’s happening, and just like the post we provided last Friday : Providing some vital insight of our company.

Primary topics:

  1. Stability/Reliability state
  2. V2 Hub Overview

Meeting Info:

Every other Wednesday for 1 hour
8pm EST / 7pm CST / 5pm PST

To join the Meeting:
https://bluejeans.com/551112646

To join via Phone:

  1. Dial:
    +1 408 740 7256
    +1 888 240 2560 (US or Canada only)
    (see all numbers - http://bluejeans.com/numbers)
  2. Enter Conference ID: 551112646

Please post your questions below.

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Before posing some questions, I’m wondering if I can ask a question that, while it might sound insulting, really isn’t intended that way:

Is Jeff one of those CTO’s that flaunts the title but doesn’t actually get his hands dirty - instead working at a very high/abstracted level, or is Jeff one of those CTO’s that has the title only by accident and really would prefer to just be another engineer that solves real code level problems?

(Really, I don’t intend this to be as insulting as it sounds.)

@April, if there’s a more politically correct way of asking this, please feel free to edit as needed.)

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Jeff is one of those CTO’s is just another engineer that solves real code level problems. He’s very involved, and is one of the most involved “high titled” individuals I have ever met. He’s extremely busy all the time, and he’s involved in every incidents/developer’s chatrooms, especially when there’s an incident happening. he’s VERY passionate about ST and its platform. I say this from experience seeing him around the office and through our communication channels within the company.

Also : He’s super modest. I use the title because that’s how the public knows him as. If I just said “Jeff hagins to talk!” …without context, I might as well say, “April Wong” and people would ask…“Who?”. :smile:

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Good. I can ask real questions then, and expect real answers. Nice.

So, as I’ve asked before, is there any way that ST can be more transparent about platform changes? For example, while trying to catch up from being on vacation for a couple weeks, it appears that there were a few issues that might have been fixed in the platform, but which there’s nothing documenting the fixes. (I haven’t yet confirmed either of these for myself, but am relying on reports from forum posts by users - not by ST.)

One apparently is the accessibility of device raw descriptions in device type code. Another is (also in device types) where device type code had to use different state descriptions/values for different states. For example, if two states/attributes both had possible values of “active” and “inactive”, they would screw each other up on the UI tiles.

If these issues are fixed, why isn’t ST communicating with dev users about it?

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Gary,

I can answer a bit of your questions, so you can come up with others for later :wink: . In terms of platform or mobile changes, we’ve provided them through our updates: Generally when it happens. In terms of the new platform changes, that was the post that Jeff had provided. within these next couple of weeks, Devconn is going through some major changes: and he communicated that. We’re hoping these types of communications will work, and will continue to improve in the future.

On the mobile side, I can tell you, that I’m reaching out to individuals who will help us do a test run/beta on those android/ios/win side, before we release it to public, so we minimize more hiccups.

On my end, we’re still working on sharing more communication to the rest of us in this community. The first hurdle was to get people into these developer discussions to talk about stuff. You may have also seen a bit more involvement with ST staff jumping into these forums. More importantly, working on logistics to get silo our communications from consumer marketing to dedicated dev’s communication. I’m working on getting developer emails out more frequently, an easier way for people to customize their accounts TO get those dev emails. Once that is established, a lot more information can flow easily to us.

Hopefully that provides a bit of insight on what we’re doing to provide better communication for you.

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I’d interested in hearing about what is planned in terms of REST endpoints on the V2 Hub. Will the hub be able to connect directly to external services and vice versa? Or will it need to go through the ST cloud?

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Would love to ask the following questions to Jeff.

Address the recent rollout of Android 1.7 and the complete breakage of many widely used community device types and the current testing process, any changes to that process, including a community beta before general release?

Address the recent platform changes and lack of detailed notes of what was changed, convieniently timed with the Android 1.7 rollout that broke a lot of community device types, what testing and coordination between the Mobile App team and the Platform team is done to insure this type of regression and collision of change doesn’t occur?

Phantom devices and smartapps in the IDE that continue to function after end-user deletes, without any visibility to end-user. I have had several situations where deleting a device and creating a new device with the same DNI, the old device would continue to receive responses, act if it is still installed, but never available to me.

Device Tile improvements, where is the HTML tile? Image Tile? Dynamic Tiles (ability to show, hide or add or delete tiles)? A List view?

IDE improvements roadmap? Lot of promises, not much has been delivered.

Live Video and Recorded Video plans, premium platform costs, etc?

App Store plans and model? ETA?

Securing source code of community provided device types and smartapps, encryption for public publication, keys stored in IDE, so ST has full visibility of running code, no real difference today, but allows for secure distribution of apps in lieu of an App Store.

Audio /Visual support, IR, control surfaces, UDP and Raw Socket Support. (I got UDP working, fyi!)

Cloud to Cloud support were SSL cert is expired or invalid, an ability to ignore this warning.

2 factor authentication for mobile app, IDE and other log in areas?

Hub v2 discussion, specifically on what local API commands can be sent / processed to the hub without going to cloud, ex. device status polling at a local leve.

Local storage options, caching files, etc. on hub v2. External storage as an option?

Hub v1 role post v2 rollout. Will it be allowed to be a repeater?

Multiple user levels, access and control? Separate app notifications?

Email notifications, with attachments?

MMS notifications, sending images?

Wifi based mobile presence instead of GPS based or in addition to?

Wake on Lan support from hub?

That’s all I can think of right now, I’m sure more will come up before Wednesday :smile:

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I replied up above on how we will be addressing that. :slight_smile: reaching out to people this week.:

On the mobile side, I can tell you, that I’m reaching out to individuals who will help us do a test run/beta on those android/ios/win side, before we release it to public, so we minimize more hiccups.

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April, what I’m wanting to ask (or better - to get answered) is WHY the platform update notes aren’t more comprehensive. They are posted (once in a while) but usually only contain 1 or 2 things.

Imagine being a developer with some new wiz-bang thing. You post it and everyone loves it. The next day, the entire thing explodes for no apparent reason. You search the forums, but there’s nothing mentioned about any changes that would impact your code.

You specifically search out “platform update” posts, but they give the impression that ST works for 2 weeks to fix one bug and nothing else. (We know this isn’t true, but if there are only 1 or 2 things noted in the platform changes, it can certainly leave that impression.)

The channel is there. Why isn’t ST using it? This is what I’d like to ask Jeff. (Actually, I want to amend that to request that the words “in a few weeks” isn’t used in the answer.)

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Hello @April, I just second all the questions that Patrick asked, plus the following one:

  • If a beta certification program with the community of device type & smartapp developers is possible, when and how can we implement it?

This is to avoid all the issues we had with Android v1.7…

Thnx.

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@garyd9 gotcha. I’ll make sure he addresses that.

@yvesracine : the current beta(s) we have established are : Device integrations and now mobile versions of the app. We do tap in with community members on creating specific device types for us, and will soon have also a way for them to test those. … in terms of certifications through community made device types and smartapps… that we’re evaluating on our end. SmartApp approvals have been slow on our end. There’s a huge bottleneck in resources. We’re alleviating that. I’ll honestly admit, that until those people fully integrated, it’d be a while until we tap into community to check both smart Apps and device types. We certainly will be viewing HOW , also. The upvote/downvote system, when integrated, will be helpful in those cases.

to avoid all the issues we had with 1.7, just even having the mobile beta will help majority of those issues. Thus, check your mailboxes really soon, within this week, as I reach out to you to assist us in participating in these mobile betas. Alternatively, if you, for sure, really want to help identify these bugs for us and try out the new updates prior to release: PLEASE let me know, and reach out to me by PM or email. I’ll be sure to include you.

Also, check what my buddy @mager said:

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On behalf of just regular users, I want to ask what’s going on with:

Anything which is in labs, yet to come, pulled back etc.

  1. Philips Hue
    2 Logitech Harmony
  2. Sonos and others…
  3. Whatever happened to Rachio to pull back
  4. Chamberlain MyQ

And the other touted integrations.

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I second this question from @smart as well… This was a huge disappointment!

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I too would like to hear about the MyQ integration, Honeywell integration (is one planned or in the works?), any updates coming to the Logitech Harmony. Probably others, but can’t think of any more at the moment.

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I would also like to hear details on what has been the cause(s) of the platform instability over the past months…

Is there anything the community can do to help?

What solutions are already in place to improve stability?

What is planned to implement to continue to improve stability?

Is it resources? Is it poor coding? Is it database or processing / memory?

How dramatic of an improvement to the platform stability will local processing via Hub v2 be?

Some statistics on scope of sessions, users, devicetypes installed, smartapps installed, most popular smartapps, devices, etc. ( I realize this might not be wanted to be made public… but whatever can be shared would be great)

Also, what are the planned release cycles? I assume no more platform updates on a Friday? :smile:

Finally, what is the goal for uptime / reliability for SmartThings and how is it currently measured?

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16

I would like to pose this to Jeff

First Idea/Question:

Smart Phones do a lot more than just presence. The IFTTT app exposes many of the events that happen on a mobile to its servers. What are the prospects if any that ST will bring mobile phones into the platform as fully integrated device types. Being able to trigger events based on not only geolocation, but other phone events in a native way would be awesome. There are so many possibilities including NFC, beacons, messages, phone calls, etc. You can do some of this now with IFTTT but it can take up to 15 minutes to trigger a color change on your lights after a missed call. This a something I would not mind having a separate app for.

Second question:

Is the SmartThings way going to be a single app or a family of apps?

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Hey Guys -

Great questions thus far. I’ve compiled a list. Keep them coming.

Cheers.

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I’m interested in this as well.
Thanks

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Idea. Would it be possible to add a mode at thing level, so it would be: On, Off, Manual.

There have been a few times That I wish I had 1 thing to stay on, off of what I have programmed.

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I’d like to know if anyone is working on addressing the UI for non-technical users. I’m pretty comfortable at getting things set up, but I’d like my wife to just have the ability to turn on and off switches from her app without having to mess around with a lot of options.

Right now I’m getting around this by having a SmartTiles.click dashboard saved to her phone, but I shouldn’t have to do that. Why can’t the app default to open to your devices? Or to your shortcuts? Or to anything other than what she sees now: http://i.imgur.com/vkHYQ1T.jpg

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