I may be a bit jaded but I spend more time dealing with helping new users work around stuff that OH 2 does automatically, namely the Control tab in PaperUI and Simple Mode, that it will take a lot to convince me that this is a good idea. Honestly, this proposal just sounds like a continuation of this.
But what if it’s something like the Astro binding where I may only care about one or two of the 30+ available Channels? The same goes for OpenWeatherMap. As I look through my Things, I’ve only linked about 50-75% of them to Items. Looking at my Items, only about 75% of those are on my sitemap. Automatically generated UIs like this will result in more work for me or make it so I have to have a bunch of stuff on my UI that I don’t want to be there.
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. But it very well could become one if it isn’t executed well.
This is why I am suggesting it offers multiple choices that you can choose from how you want to “Display as” in your sitemap. For example if you have a full colour light with strobe and disco mode controls you can select to ‘Display as’ a ‘Dim/On/Off’ and you only get the two controls. If you want to Display it as ‘Basic with Advanced button’ you then get the basic controls and have a button that opens up the advanced setting when you want them. I have not used the Astro binding to suggest a few ways it could be displayed, but I am sure you could think of 2-3 ways that would keep a lot of people happy and be edited quickly into something that even more would love. Faster to delete a few controls then to create 4 controls from scratch especially when it is a new binding you have never used before.
I also do not like the idea of getting 30+ channels and controls getting thrown into a sitemap, so this is why I am suggesting the “Display as concept” which is done by a Binding creator who understands the hardware and how a lot of people will be using the hardware.
Yes the same could be said about any new feature. This is why a discussion at a concept level is great as someone may have a better idea and I would love to hear how Openhab can be made much faster to setup and remove the chance of a typo causing an issue.
I would love to see a much more improved designer in the future. I’m playing around with HomeHabbit for a while now and I’m really suprised how easy and well this is working. Sure it has some “issues” and potential for improvements but I was able to get a usable Layout in less than 30mintes by using just my phone (Yes it’s quite warm!)
