Alternative UIs? OpenRemote, iRule, iViewer?

I suppose it depends on your goals and how you want to use it. My home automation philosophy is that it should just work and if I have to resort to interact with a GUI it is a use case failure. I want as little GUI as possible and it should either just do its thing most of the time and only require use of a GUI in rare cases. This is largely why I’ve limited my lighting automation to just two lamps and one fixture. The rest are easier and better controlled manually.

From my wife’s perspective, the user interface is the IFTTT button app which has three buttons, one for each garage door opener and one for the lights. She has an iPhone so I can’t just put them on her desktop nor is something like Tasker available to further automate the interactions. From my perspective, I have IFTTT Do button widgets on my phone’s home screen and anything I need to know about (e.g. door has been opened but no one is home) I get via notifications. Even for the garage door I have a menu that pops up when I get close to the house asking if I want to open the garage. If I need fine grained control (e.g. turn on one lamp but not all lamps) I use Tasker with AutoVoice or the default app. It is only when need to troubleshoot a problem or I want to look at some charts that I look at the sitemap in the default app.

However, if I get to the point where I have an installed touchscreen controller, I will probably move to something better for a UI than the defaults currently available.

Rich