Cancel a new device creation and general UI issues

This UI quirk has bugged me for years and I assume there's a reason why it's persisted all this time, but I couldn't find a previous discussion. I encounter it pretty frequently.

Why is there no "cancel" option when you go to create a new device? Say you choose a device type, and for whatever reason you change your mind...maybe it couldn't sync, or something wasn't right. You close the dialog box without any actual device set up, and you end up with an greyed-out "new device" in your devices list that you then have to find and manually delete.

Along similar lines, I'd love to see some (any?) work put into UI improvements...Indigo's UI hasn't been updated at ALL, in the ~10 years I've been using it as far as I can recall. The plug-in update feature, and showing Delays in the Action list, are the two lonely improvements we've gotten. Simple things like multiple conditions in a Trigger (e.g if ANY of these are true AND ALL of these are true), to re-ordering Actions with drag-and-drop rather than clicking an "UP" button 23 times, or at minimum inserting the new action below the currently-selected one, etc. Control pages layout design is pretty clunky. Ugly plug-in configuration windows with poor sizing. This is a modern Mac app that still looks like a Windows 95 app.

I know there's workarounds for this stuff and obviously what's most important is the guts, not the packaging, but it would be great to see SOME effort put into UI improvements. At least a few of the more annoying items that we've all just learned to live with. Matt/Jay -- is this stuff on the roadmap, and if not, why?

This UI quirk has bugged me for years and I assume there's a reason why it's persisted all this time, but I couldn't find a previous discussion. I encounter it pretty frequently.

Why is there no "cancel" option when you go to create a new device? Say you choose a device type, and for whatever reason you change your mind...maybe it couldn't sync, or something wasn't right. You close the dialog box without any actual device set up, and you end up with an greyed-out "new device" in your devices list that you then have to find and manually delete.

Along similar lines, I'd love to see some (any?) work put into UI improvements...Indigo's UI hasn't been updated at ALL, in the ~10 years I've been using it as far as I can recall. The plug-in update feature, and showing Delays in the Action list, are the two lonely improvements we've gotten. Simple things like multiple conditions in a Trigger (e.g if ANY of these are true AND ALL of these are true), to re-ordering Actions with drag-and-drop rather than clicking an "UP" button 23 times, or at minimum inserting the new action below the currently-selected one, etc. Control pages layout design is pretty clunky. Ugly plug-in configuration windows with poor sizing. This is a modern Mac app that still looks like a Windows 95 app.

I know there's workarounds for this stuff and obviously what's most important is the guts, not the packaging, but it would be great to see SOME effort put into UI improvements. At least a few of the more annoying items that we've all just learned to live with. Matt/Jay -- is this stuff on the roadmap, and if not, why?

My guess is that the device needs to be created (i.e. given an Indigo unique ID) before it can do some of the things required to configure it. That's why there's no cancel. But...

I'd recommend posting in the Feature Requests https://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=84 thread for some of the changes you're recommending. Matt and Jay rarely discuss the roadmap, but they do read the feature request board.

[jay (support)]

[My guess is that the device needs to be created (i.e. given an Indigo unique ID) before it can do some of the things required to configure it. That's why there's no cancel.

This is correct, and is specifically related to how plugins create devices and the fact that plugins run in a separate process from the server (in order to protect the server from a misbehaving plugin). This won't change any time soon as it would require significant structural change.

Jay this could easily be fixed by having a "cancel" button instead of just the close window button. If you have to create the device in the background before the window is closed, then fine. Create the device as normal, but if I click "cancel" it closes the device creation box AND then deletes the orphaned device in the Device list so I don't have to manually find it in my list of 200 devices and then click the delete button myself.

This is exactly what I'm talking about where stuff is just clunkier than it needs to be. It's an easily fixed problem, but there just doesn't seem to be any effort or interest in improving the UI. Some basic UI improvements would literally benefit EVERY user, whereas half the feature updates only benefit a select few. I just don't get why it's a zero priority issue.

Anyway, I appreciate the prompt reply.

[matt (support)]

I know it looks like the UI isn't a priority, but just a note that on our major wish list is actually a large UI overhaul. Getting it done builds on top of lots of architectural level changes we've been working on for a while, so it is still not on the short-term radar.. We haven't sunk time into large-ish UI features in some time because we'll have a bigger UI overhaul in the future that would make most of that "throw away" work. Point being, despite its appearance, UI and usability are still a top priority for us.

Your workaround suggestion is a reasonable approach, but as Jay said given Indigo's plugin API and how plugins can create devices it would be significantly more complex and time consuming to implement and QA than an "easy fix" or change.