Requests for sending/handling notifications from SmartApps

General Discussion
1

Just a few things:

  • When you send a notification to the SmartThings iPhone app from your SmartApp, it shows up on the lock screen and in the iOS notifications center. That’s great. When I launch the SmartThings app, the notification appears again in a custom banner as well (slightly redundant, but fine). However, launching the app doesn’t clear the notifications out of the iOS notifications center, and I didn’t see any obvious way to see notifications for a given app to clear them on a per-app basis. This means that you have to clear them manually from the center, which can be a bit tedious to have to do every time you get a notification. I could turn off notification center support for SmartThings, but I like to see events I missed there. I’d just like a way to respond to those notifications from the app.

  • I mentioned this in another thread, but it would be great if a previously-sent notification could be removed from the iOS notifications center when the situation has been resolved through an API call. For example, I have a “the door is open” notification sent when a door is left open; when the door is closed, I’d like the notification to automatically be removed. This would be similar to how iOS Mail and iMessage automatically remove notifications for new messages after you’ve read them, even if you do so from another device.

  • Somewhat tangential, but it would be handy to have a metadata option on text preferences so that it doesn’t auto-capitalize the beginning of each word (aka “title mode”), and instead would just act like a simpler text field. That way when I type “The basement door is open!” it won’t default to “The Basement Door Is Open!”.

Thanks!

– Joe

2

Thanks for the suggestions, Joe! I’ll get them on the community-requested features list.

3

I came up with an example use case for handling notifications in a more complete manner:

Once I get around to it, I’m want to rig up an Arduino with a ThingShield to use photocells to detect when the “done” lights on my washer and dryer have lit. This would then send a notification to our phones (my wife’s and mine), thus avoiding the need to walk down two flights of stairs to the basement to see if it’s actually finished or not. She of course never has her phone with her (especially at home), so I was thinking of also using a Philips Hue (or similar, once supported) to change the color of the lights in the room she’s most often in as a secondary notification.

Ideally, the following would reset the lights back to their previous state:

  • Opening the washer/dryer door, which would cause the LED to go off, thus causing the Arduino to send an event to any listening SmartApps to reset the lights (simple enough)
  • Acknowledging the notification from our phones from within the SmartThings app
  • Pressing a ZWave/Zigbee/whatever button that we’d have rigged up to otherwise control the lights (once there is more remote support).

And there’d probably some time-of-day pref to skip the lights if it’s 2 in the morning.

Anyway, the ability to have the app recognize that the notification was handled and perform an action based on that would be pretty helpful. It would be even neater if the notifications could include yes/no behaviors, although it’s not clear to me if that’s exposed through the iOS APIs (for example, my phone will sometimes as if my Pebble smartwatch is allowed to connect, and there’s a snooze control for alarms, but I believe those are handled by the OS and that it may not be possible to send such notifications from the public API).

Thanks again

– Joe