SmartTiles announcement

You nailed it, Ron.
SmartThings’ unintuitive mobile phone interface fine for some, but JUST DOESN’T CUT IT for many. My wife would NEVER had let me do the level of SmartThings installation in the house if it weren’t for it weren’t for SmartTiles and the custom instance I have set up for her on her tablet and laptop. For me, I control the entire house from my DESKTOP at work using SmartTiles. At home, I use SmartTiles on the laptop in the kitchen. When on the road, SmartTiles either on laptop or iPhone. The only times I access SmartThings through the SmartThings interface is when I need to add or change a device!

SmartThings interface: confusing, cumbersome.
SmartTiles: simple, intuitive, elegant.

10 Likes

well its safe to say this news has been the biggest uproar in this communities history (well aslong as ive been around anyways)

Its either time SmartThings put their hand in their pocket and says “thanks alex, youve created something great here and we want to financially reward you for it (or buy it) and have you work with us from now on in-house to manage its evolution as a built in feature and this way we can give it the correct proccessing requirements we couldnt offer your before as a third party developer…”

Or

They need to speed up the concept of an app store and then open up the functions available to what id class as “guru-developers” (ones who have shown exceptional input and value to the brand and users alike who are trusted by ST) to encourage them to stay with SmartThings before any other brands with equally deep pockets start poking there nose in and around these forums and identifying our strongest assets before stealing there loyalty to create great products for them :wink:

As someone said previously, apple looks after their developer community as if they were royalty, because they identified early, that without them, they dont really have anything other than another smartphone… the apps, integrations and features submitted from there developer community has lead to the direct employment of many of there previously third party developers as they were to valuable to loose to competitors and their ideas and concepts were what really helped push the system as a whole forward year after year…

its in everyones interest and more so STs to attract, assist and reward developers like alex who bring major value to the system and will really hold the keys and means to a bigger brighter future for ST.

Despite all the above however, i do feel ST will have identified all this feedback and taken it on board and will no doubt act upon it in the way they see best, they havnt once denied it to be great, even ben stated he loved it but obviously some agreement has to be made to help bigger and more needy third party apps be viable with ST (which lets be fair, is 110% in there interest also, if it keeps us on there system and not someone elses) i just hope its addressed before its to late and other brands identify and kidnap all our finest dev community assets (alex been one)

Kyle

4 Likes

Thanks for the post Kyle.

To answer the most important question…

Yes we are taking this very seriously. We absolutely LOVE @625alex’s dashboard (I may, or may not, have used it before I moved :stuck_out_tongue: ) and we honestly want to help him make it great with better tools from us :smile:

1 Like

The two interfaces are designed to solve two different problems. I believe SmartThings is addressing the cumbersome and confusing aspects of the mobile UI in a future update, but it will probably never serve the same purpose as a SmartTiles dashboard. The tiled dashboard would also be as equally confusing if it were being used as the main configuration interface for SmartThings.

5 Likes

I agree with @jody.albritton. IMHO, SmartThings is focused on Home Automation industry, not Remote Controlling your Home industry. If done right, you don’t need to control anything anywhere. Things should auto magically actuate based on sensors without human intervention. At least that should be the main goal of automation.

3 Likes

This is SmartThings’ goal.

3 Likes

The often stated idea that “things happening automagically should be the goal of home automation” is a respectable philosophy, but not the only one.

Many of us prefer a mix of home control and home automation, for all kinds of reasons.

My own physical state varies wildly from one day to another. On days when I have a lot of pain, I keep the lights much dimmer. There’s nothing sensors would pick up to distinguish one state from another (currently there is no practical medical monitor for pain levels).

In other homes, there may be “fussy baby” days or “inlaws visiting” days or “don’t interrupt the playoff game” days. Times when we want to overrule some of the scheduled events and just decide for ourselves when certain things happen.

I’m all in favor of automagic event control as an option. But it doesn’t replace the need for a solid manual trigger UI as another option. There’s no “should” preference for one method over the other: each person needs to be free to mix and match as they prefer.

One of the best things about SmartTiles was the degree of customization it provided.

Submitted with respect.

4 Likes

There will come one day where there’s going to be sensors to detect your pain level.

again, sensors for fussy baby. Maybe a complicated combination of heartbeat sensor, stomach bloat etc. etc

Presence Sensor!

well, if you can find internet feed on these, they can be made to event to trigger something.

You may not have these sensors available at all now, but we are moving towards the right step, especially wearable gadget is the first move towards reading your body condition. I’m looking forward to the day where we can measure what’s going on in our body with convenience. e.g alcohol contents, sugar level etc.

That’s an important distinction to make between home automation and home control. I believe most users need both solutions as there are somethings you just don’t want to automate in my opinion (automatically unlocking your door for example). I think the smart things mobile app is ok, not great, at controlling things, but the dashboard built by Alex and Florianz definitely filled a gap. Hopefully ST will take the advice of the “senior” community developers and open up more of the system for them to build more robust, and “system performance friendly” applications and tools.

2 Likes

This is exactly how I feel - while I’d love to have everything completely automated, the fact of the matter is that at least half the time at my house the manual control is far more important for the WAF. And in all honesty, the WAF is what determines what I get to buy/implement, so the harder it is for us to manually control when needed, the less I get to buy or install.
In the end, there has to be a balance of automation vs manual control for most families, and since every household is going to have a different balance, that seems to require more customizable options for the consumer.

2 Likes

“Someday” everything will be great. (I read that on Kickstarter. :wink:) But unlike most people for whom any degree of home automation beyond a push button remote is mostly just a tinkerer’s hobby, my “now” requires environmental controls. I can’t turn on a light, open a door, or get out of bed without assistance.

Old engineers’ motto: “In theory there isn’t much difference between theory and practice. In practice there usually is.”

While it’s fun to think about what may eventually be available, I spend my money based on the practicality of the stuff that’s available now.

And even with all the future possibilities, I still believe having the option of both home control and automagic will let people choose the mix they personally prefer, regardless of their reasons.

5 Likes

Regarding being customizable, www.simplerulebuilder.com (built by @JoeC) is the closest non-code gui tool to create a scenario (a rule) for what you need to have happen. I would love to see this granular control in creating our own custom “app” exist along with SmartTiles, as well as even more granular control, in the gui form. At least make it an advanced option in the mix of things.

The community here is clearly paving the way form the evolution of SmartThings management tools, being both a phone app and a browser app.

Edit: credit to @JoeC for building SimpleRuleBuilder.

Meaning to have the home adapt?

I moved 3 posts to an existing topic: Simple rule builder 1.0

Home automation, where “Things should auto magically actuate based on sensors without human intervention” is an amazing goal. However, I doubt that I will live long enough to have the necessary chip installed in my brain to allow for this. Maybe I’m the oddball out, but at least for now how does ST know that I am entering my studio to: 1) Read, 2) listen to music, 3) compose, 4) rehearse or 5) work on the computer? (each of those tasks has different settings for lights, fans, heat etc). Similarly, when I go into the yard/pool area at night is it to: grill some steaks, swim, let the dog out, look at the night sky or chase the coyotes away from the trash? (again each task involves different lights at different levels). SmartTiles allows me to do those things very simply, with one button touch from my iphone, the desktop in the studio, my laptop or the tablets mounted by the back door and by the pool. Yes, I can fire off the same things from within the mobile SmartThings App, but I can’t do that from desktop, laptop or tablets. I don’t see that ST automation is anywhere close to being able to distinguish what I am going to do in these and many other situations. Until it does, the simple intuitive interface of SmartTiles is what works for me.

3 Likes

Until then. Please spend some resources on the dashboard. Some of us actually need it. Not to mention it’s also a free advertisement with ST logo on it. Win win for everyone.

3 Likes

Sensors is not the right approach, at least not by itself.

Perhaps you’ve never dealt with legal liability issues, otherwise you’d know better than to guess about sensors and infants. No wallet is deep enough to withstand even the slightest mistakes there…

What’s necessary is an understanding of behaviors and effective ways to adjust how automation operates outside them.

Thermostats with vacation schedules and temporary overrides is one example. They’re programmed one way, but have an accessible interface for making temporary changes. There’s, perhaps, something to be said for coordinating with a stored calendar, but then you introduce a level of fragility and waste of resources for something that really doesn’t need it.

So what’s desirable is a system that observes and asks for guidance, but has deep respect for handling exceptions throughout it’s automation.

Other examples are when there’s cleaning staff. A crew swiping keypads is enough to nearly give your house a seizure from all the conflicting automation commands. Same thing applies during parties, or when there’s guests present. That’s the kind of smarts an automation system needs to have. Not an endless series of tiny little things that all have to be configured.

This is really discouraging. I have Smartthings at home, and am looking for automation in a small church. I need to manage them separately so I can give others access, but not to my home. From what I can find from research, this was an option, and it sounds like it was a good option. Now, I don’t see any options with Smartthings, and at least at this point, with this going on, I am reticent to trust any developer’s addon. For my home, maybe- I can manage my own problems or deal with things that might not ever work again. But I can’t honestly recommend it for others. So I will look for something other than Smartthings. What am I missing?

I’d not heard it before, but the distinction of home control vs home automation is critical. I expect the technology to continuously improve the automation portion, reducing the control component, but probably not totally in my lifetime. And I observe that the more I’m able to automate things, often the more things I want to do/have done, and consequently, the more control I want!

1 Like

SmartTiles released Version 5.5 just over a week ago and is more popular than ever. You can create 5 distinct dashboards. Give it a try…

http://SmartTiles.click/install