UI enhancements

Posted on
Wed May 13, 2015 8:53 am
brian.vanheesch offline
Posts: 17
Joined: May 05, 2014

UI enhancements

The OS X UI is quite good once you get familiar with its usage. I would suggest the following improvements:

Copy & Paste of Action(s)
The ability to copy and paste actions. Or at the very least, the ability to create an action group from a trigger. So often, there is an elegant trigger, but now you want to access it via a control page. Today, I need to "recode" the trigger as an action group, and relink the trigger and control page. Tedious.

Show Dependencies on Action Groups
Why is this missing? Schedules allow for "Show Dependencies", but not Actin Groups?

Global Search
Nothing worse than having to open and close many embedded python scripts looking for a specific snippet/sample or a device that you want to rename:

Code: Select all
device=indigo.devices["Kitchen"]

(yes I know you recommend using ID:

Code: Select all
device=indigo.devices[23876567283]

but who can keep track of all those numbers?

Comboboxes instead of dropdown
For small to medium sized lists, a dropdown is viable option. When the list size ekes over 25 items, it is time to use a combobox and allow searching/filtering.

Filtering/Searching
The search function at the top of the Devices section is good. Often you want to filter the list by type or status. If I were to right-click in the table cell (state, type, remote display, etc); allow me to "Show only items like this one" (or so).

Fix the Sorting of Device State
Ugh. I realize there are different types and different values and different icons, etc. But to not be able to sort the word "on" and "off" in any reason manner is just weird.

Posted on
Thu May 14, 2015 5:15 pm
matt (support) offline
Site Admin
User avatar
Posts: 21411
Joined: Jan 27, 2003
Location: Texas

Re: UI enhancements

Thanks for the feedback. I'll add the ones that aren't duplicates to our feature request list.

A couple of comments. First, global search is a good feature request but in regards to your example scenario, I normally right-click on the device and choose the Copy Python Reference menu item, which results in something like this:

Code: Select all
indigo.devices[1521382390] # "Office Motion Detector"

That is, it accesses the device by ID (good, won't break if renamed) but also includes the name as a comment for readability. The comment will get out-of-sync if the device is really renamed, but in most cases it will be close enough as to still explain which device it is.

Lastly, the sorting intentionally ignores the device state. We've experimented with enabling that, but then with live sorting your devices end up jumping around the table to different locations which can be very confusing. We could disable live sorting in that case, but that too starts to get complicated (and confusing).

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