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Ideas & Feature Requests
Option to temporarily highlight recently changed tiles
The ideas that I am submitting has been submitted in the past but was withdrawn with the release of some near-hit styling options that met the need, sort of (see link below). In my opinion it would be very useful to add a feature that would let you see, at a glance, which tiles have recently changed; either in the form of a short-lived pulse of the tile or a dark-to-normal color fade over n seconds.
It was said in the previous idea that people are not vigilantly watching their dashboards for updates. Although true I feel that an increasing amount of people will increasingly begin relying on dashboards for security and presence monitoring. I can think of many situations where this could be useful for events of both low and high priority. There is a current option to use different colors based on intentions, this would get closer to satisfying the this idea's feature-request if it had a time restriction on when the "warn" color is to be used. Example - for most of the day I would like my garage's presence sensor to just show me if it is occupied (low priority), but after 10pm if when I am back home it would be a problem if presence was detected (high priority). Having a dashboard with 30+ tiles I may not see at first glance that a room was just occupied when it should not be.
At night when I am in my office I do monitor outside motion and indoor presence, some would say vigilantly - while concentrating on my work with with my device visible out of the corner of my eye, I notice somethings has changed but takes a bit to figure out what did change and if it matters. A temporary pulsing or darker-shaded tile would allow to me to look over and then back to my screen without breaking my thoughts or typing rhythm.
Dan
Previous idea that was withdrawn:
Answer
Really interesting idea, thanks!
Personally I'm not super inclined to find it valuable, because I wonder how many folks are vigilantly watching their Panels for activity. But then again, if at some point we add notification sounds, then customers would have a reason to glance over to see the reason for the notification and a "pulsing" Tile appearance of the relevant Tile(s) would be useful...
I think it could be most useful for people who *aren't* vigilantly watching but have AT running on a device to the side somewhere. For example, I usually leave AT open on my iPhone which most of the time I keep it on a charging dock on a side table. If my tiles pulsed or something when something happened it would draw my attention and let me know there'd been some kind of activity.
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With the new high visibility themes and being able to set an alternative highlight color with tile intentions, I think my original suggestion is kind of moot now. The combo of these 2 new features makes it really easy to get a good idea of the state of my things at a glance and draws my attention when something changes.
Hi Dan,
I'm struggling to understand how exactly this is different from the previous Feature Request.
We expect that Feature Ideas get refined through the discussion process as various Customers contribute their personal use-cases and we present either implementation complications or other doubts.
Hi Terry, there is no difference from the previous request - but it was withdrawn and I therefore assumed it was no longer in the running. I wanted to re-activate it with some renewed enthusiasm, and unlike the previous guy I don't feel the recently released features satisfy the feature request. Simply put a feature that temporarily highlights a recently changed tiles would be a good value-add.
Logical example: I have 8 rooms in which I am capturing presence, it's late at night and only one rooms shows occupied (my office). Now I glance over at my Panel and notice 4 rooms are active, one of which is my younger daughter's room. I think situation I would be interested to know know roughly how long each one has been active so know where to find her easier. Is she making her way to the pool deck or did she just hit the kitchen and is going back to her room?
Trivial situation I know, but the same could be said for the motion sensors outside, all of a sudden I glance over and both the pool deck and the driveway are on - is the sequence of events from the driveway onto the pool deck (someone coming in) or from the pool deck to the driveway (someone leaving). I can check in smartthings but would be nice to see quickly in Action Tiles.
As you may know some other platforms have this feature, none of which are as good as ActionTiles overall but just to show this feature is in demand. Here is an example of how it can be done in WebCore: https://wiki.webcore.co/Samples#Presence_Tiles.
I think this is a cool idea, as I travel a lot. I don't want to be bothered all the time with med-low priority messages, I.e. I don't need to be woken up at 4am in the morning in Europe when my poolguy enters the backyard. However I usually check the house in the morning to get the warm-fuzzy that everything's peachy at home. I really like the idea of tiles taking on a strong (configurable) contrast color, which gradually fades with time like in WebCore. +1
Agree, I am still definitely hoping this option will be available soon. In the meantime I implemented a room presence/occupied setup that uses the dimming feature to achieve a similar output. I created some virtual dimmer switches and applied some logic to that when a room is immediately occupied it shows 100% and decreases in increments of 10% until the allotted time frame expires and the room is no longer shown as occupied. So if a room's presence is set to expire after 10 minutes of inactivity, each minute the dimmer presence switch will show 10% less until is turns off. Not nearly as good as a fading color shade but does the trick for now.
Customer support service by UserEcho
Really interesting idea, thanks!
Personally I'm not super inclined to find it valuable, because I wonder how many folks are vigilantly watching their Panels for activity. But then again, if at some point we add notification sounds, then customers would have a reason to glance over to see the reason for the notification and a "pulsing" Tile appearance of the relevant Tile(s) would be useful...