[RELEASE] ActionTiles, the homepage for your SmartThings home!

Yes, you stated this. But without any explanation as to why, I believe. I’m curious so I’m asking why.

And much of what you wrote above did imply it was related to potential unreliability of a remote server?

Edit: BTW, if the answer is “because I want to roll my own servers, it’s fun and I enjoy it as a hobby,” or something like that. No argument here. I’m just curious, like I said.

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Actually I am using Samsung phones most of the time. They don’t come with a default case. But I go and purchase “Samsung” original cases. That’s how I like it.
I told here several times that money is not my concern. Why are you taking it to such point , I don’t understand. Seriously ?

I never said your ideas were negative. I just don’t think they are realistic. More and more technology related software and services are hosted remotely and whether you are strictly paying for the software or it’s a combination of someones hardware for a cost with included software, you aren’t going to be able to host most things on your own servers (your cloud). Fewer and fewer things are going to be accessible locally in the future. I don’t like every single company having access to my accounts and information. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small hosted server or a billion dollar corporation (these are more unsafe than anything as they are the biggest targets of hackers) versus a small mom and pops server. Reliability of the ST cloud has been so unreliable in the last month. I get what you are going after, but that’s not where technology is headed or going to allow you to do.

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It’s because of how you word things in one post, and then differently in another. If you have 0 concern over money, 0 concern over reliability, and 0 concern over security, then it shouldn’t matter where you are accessing data from, your own servers or a hosted server.

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Let’s say;

  1. I want to roll my own servers, it’s fun and I enjoy it as a hobby (I also like making small developments, modifications and additions - contributing you may call)
  2. I prefer to keep things closed as long as it is possible. For example, I prefer to run IP Cameras with no cloud access. But I am FORCED to use cloud services such as ST and Alexa , because there is no alternative.
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Unfortunately, that’s where the world is headed man. And more of it to come. Trust me, if I could keep everything contained on my own servers without everything of mine exposed, that would be awesome, but that’s not the direction that the world of technology is going in.

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maybe it’s because english is not my native language. I may be having difficulty in expressing the real reson.

:slight_smile: That’s why I was trying to say that I’m not knocking you or disagree with you, but there is going to be very little in the end that we get to hold onto and keep locally and to ourselves. I get that it is fun and a hobby. But the direction of every company is going cloud based for cost and efficiency and it’s only going to increase, leaving very little for us to host in our own environments.

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I am aware of that. Unfortunately…
But I can host on my LAN, as long as there is an alternative. So why should I prefer ActionTiles ?
Why are we discussing this ? No point…

I prefer ActionTiles because:

  • I can arrange different panels with a list of devices laid out how I want to see them.
  • I can have my wall Tablet wake up when I walk by and my panel is immediately available with access to my devices.
  • I can lock down certain devices on the panel that require a pin code for someone to access
  • I can view all of my camera feeds on these same panels
  • Ability to launch other applications from a Tile within my panels
  • Ability to display 7 day forecast, live radar Doppler from within my panels

I could care less if this is hosted on my own servers or theirs. It’s no different than how your SmartThings information is stored on Samsung servers.

Without ActionTiles I have the alternative SmartThings App which:

  • Takes 30 seconds to load my Things
  • I have to scroll through every single device (north and south)
  • I can’t view all my camera feeds in one consolidated place without opening up each individual device

Until SmartThings launches a different app (which could be coming soon) with a better UI and the ability to display things similar to the way AT is doing it, this is a better bread box no matter where it’s hosted, and to not purchase it because you can’t run it locally, that’s definitely your choice. :slight_smile:

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Totally agree.

This is coming from the perspective of someone who could never put something together like this myself, or even a really weak approximation of it.

But I would be surprised to learn that someone could develop something that’s self-contained on their LAN (as much as that’s possible) and provides all the features that AT does.

Having said that, I haven’t really looked at @kewashi’s dashboard app since it was in alpha stage.

But given that my ST hub is cloud-dependent anyway (along with my Blink cam, and wemo humidifier, and lutron caseta switches, and… you get my drift), having an additional remote server in the mix is well worth the additional feature set that I now have with AT.

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Of course there are non-cloud alternatives to each of those products. They require some work on your part (just like the Action Tiles replacement you’re proposing), and don’t have as much vendor’ 3rd party or community support as the Amazon/Samsung products (though a lot more than your homemade ST interface will have)…but they definitely exist.

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I was adding a few devices to my device list, and I happened to notice that I can now add my rooms (From the Rooms Manager SmartApp) to Actiontiles. It looks like a “switch” (ON/OFF) right now. Is there a way to get it to show occupied, vacant, etc?

No.

The “JGGDEV” (http://jggdev.com) weather, news, calendar Media Tile generators have been licensed by Thingterfaces LP for ActionTiles and moved to our cloud.

Please reference this post for details:

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You may want to look into Universal Device Type Translator to map the value of the switch to a presence sensor. In your case, present/not present would be more appropriate than on/off.

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Does ActionTiles work with [RELEASE] Generic Video Camera DeviceType, Yes, Live Video Streaming

ActionTiles is unable to read the video streams through SmartThings Video Camera “Things”, since SmartThings does NOT offer an API into the video streams and storage.

I thought there might be a way to add via a smartapp similar to how the smartapp above worked.

Because, I believe, the SmartThings Hub is able to connect to “rtsp://” and a few other source types (Arlo?) that don’t work directly in a browser…