Touch 2.0.5: Show more folders

Posted on
Sat Apr 25, 2015 4:31 pm
dduff617 offline
Posts: 659
Joined: Jul 05, 2006
Location: Massachusetts, USA

Touch 2.0.5: Show more folders

i'm just trying out new Indigo Touch 2.x (just updated to 2.0.5) and one thing i notice is that when i'm looking at devices at the top level, i see a list of folders. nothing new here. however, since a lot of attention seems to have been put into tuning the appearance of the app, i'll make the comment that the items in this list (folders) are larger and more widely spaced than they need to be.

with the title "Folders" on the top, and the row of icons across the bottom, i see only 6 folders on my iPhone 5s screen w/o scrolling. with folder>device as the primary user entry point for getting at arbitrary devices, seeing only a few folders on screen at a time slows down a frequently-used interaction. it seems like by simply tightening up the spacing, this could be improved without creating any difficulty with items being too small to select. suggestion: make the folders smaller (more tightly spaced) in the list, so that more can be selected w/o scrolling.

Posted on
Sat Apr 25, 2015 4:38 pm
dduff617 offline
Posts: 659
Joined: Jul 05, 2006
Location: Massachusetts, USA

more thoughts on folders

i have a big system with roughly 200 devices, about 22 folders and still growing slowly. i could probably trim that down some. i have a few to divide up the light controls across different levels of my house, plus outdoors, one is used experimental stuff, one for sonos system, one for HVAC-related, one for infrasturucture, sprinklers, weather, plots, etc.

i can play games with the names to place certain folders at the top or bottom of the list, but can't actually control the order the folders appear. suggestion: add manual ordering of folders.

AFAIK, indigo provides no way change the UI-visibility of entire folders. Even if all the devices in a folder have their "Remote Display" attribute turned off, it appears that the folder still shows up. suggestion: add a Remote Display attribute for folders.

a connected idea: i would suggest that a strict hierarchy is a bit over-constraining and that the indigo interface might be better served by supporting "tags" or additional metadata to provide more flexible ways of accessing related groups of devices. for example, devices could have metadata attributes like floor (e.g., 1, 2, 3, Basement), room (e.g. "Master Bedroom", "Kitchen", "Garage", etc.) and/or arbitrary user "tags" that could label arbitrary related groups of devices like "security lighting", "exterior lights", "occupancy sensors", etc. then instead of a strict simple hierarchy of folders, the more meaningful groupings of devices could be accomplished with something more like "smart folders" which select/group items based on their metadata/tags. i've raised this idea in past posts as far back as 2007. if they were added, these "virtual" folders or selectors might also be supported in control pages, allowing you to specify a group of items to be presented on a page by metadata criteria rather than only by manual repetitive placement of items on a page - which feels to me like it would greatly increase the usefulness of control pages.

suggestion: add more device metadata (e.g., floor, room, phase, circuit, ...) and/or tags.
suggestion: add "smart folders" which are like folders but defined by selectors based on logical combinations of criteria based on device properties or metadata
suggestion: add app and web UI support for smart folders

Posted on
Sat Apr 25, 2015 4:44 pm
dduff617 offline
Posts: 659
Joined: Jul 05, 2006
Location: Massachusetts, USA

Re: Touch 2.0.5: Show more folders

AFAIK, indigo provides no way change the UI-visibility of entire folders. Even if all the devices in a folder have their "Remote Display" attribute turned off, it appears that the folder still shows up.


oops. i just discovered that Indigo (6.1.0) does have this capability. you can right-click on a folder in the UI and toggle it's Remote Display attribute. so it is possible to remove folders that you don't want to show up in the top-level list of folders in Indigo Touch. i'll use this to cut down the list of folders that i need to scroll through to get to a device i want to control.

Posted on
Sat Apr 25, 2015 5:06 pm
howartp offline
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Joined: Jan 09, 2014
Location: West Yorkshire, UK

Touch 2.0.5: Show more folders

dduff617 wrote:

oops. i just discovered that Indigo (6.1.0) does have this capability. you can right-click on a folder in the UI and toggle it's Remote Display attribute.l

That's been around for ages! :-)

Posted on
Sat Apr 25, 2015 5:39 pm
matt (support) offline
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Location: Texas

Re: Touch 2.0.5: Show more folders

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. We have some good solutions to this on the drawing board, but they didn't make it into Indigo Touch 2.

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