[SOLVED] Web UIs for openHAB 3 - Contributor perspective

Only because that is what we have now.

Let’s say whatever is chose as the “default” UI that OH comes with. Though I’m a little uncomfortable throwing out the official phone apps as no longer supporting the “default”.

What makes you think that splitting it into it’s own app will make it any less confusing? If it’s that confusing then we shouldn’t choose that UI as our default.

I’m not saying that Setup & Maintenance needs to support all possible UIs. I’m saying it should support one default UI. Those users who want something different can install the others separately and at that point they have gained some experience with OH and shouldn’t be surprised if these optional UIs are not integrated with the Setup & Maintenance app.

If those apps were adequate we wouldn’t have so many users looking for solutions like OH. Because OH is a HUB, we would need something that can handle simple lights like controls like you describe, Nest like UI for HVAC, can show some camera feeds, and more. Are we saying that the default UI should only support ultra simple use cases?

So no native phone apps for OH 3, or do we need to involve them here too? Because the default UI design and approach chosen has a wider scope than just the web UIs.

I really don’t care what form the default UI takes. I don’t really care how the UI is sorted and configured (for the sake of this discussion). But I do think we need to:

  • have a default UI
  • have a way to create/edit/modify what is shown and how the various Items and other elements are shown on the default UI
  • have a way to prevent the editing or modification of the UI for those who don’t want their five year old messing everything up

Sitemap creation is more involved than that. Webviews? Images? Video streams? What if I want that Switch to be text and this other Switch to be controllable? Using the Group element to build sitemaps is basically useless and I’d kill it dead if I had the power. It’s one of those many places that leads new users down the wrong path to a dead end and they have to back up and start over.

So we’re back in the “Here’s this nice UI for OH.” Oh, you want to actually control all that stuff you’ve just configured, sorry, go get something else." At least that’s better than “here’s this nice Control tab, but it doesn’t work.”

UI configuration is an OH configuration task coequal to all the rest of the OH configuration concepts.

How does the new user discover and get to this separate UI app? You don’t want to talk about it in the tutorial shown in the SM app. You don’t want to have any reference or links or ways to get to it from the SM app. There’s no more Dashboard.

Ah, but from the Wordpress Admin area I have direct links to the live view of the website that I can review as I make changes. That’s all I’m asking for.

Why? We have full control over the order that concepts and information is presented to the user. And I have a real problem if our Beginner’s Tutorial doesn’t include anything about how to configure the user’s UI at all. That would be taking the user’s 90% of the way and dropping them off and telling them to find there own way from there. The Beginner’s Tutorial needs to be comprehensive in terms of covering at least one default way of configuring and using every part of OH, including the user’s ui.

Then why assume I only ever open my garage door using the OH app on my phone when I’m standing next to the button? My point is why is everyone assuming that when I say that I use my phone to open my garage door that I’m “stupid” enough to do it through my phone when I’m standing next to the button? Just because I use my phone doesn’t mean I always use my phone. Just because I use my phone doesn’t mean I always use the openHAB app.

And implying that I do and calling that stupid is pretty annoying. Give me some credit here. I know no insult was intended but it’s hard not to feel that way when the most extreme case is assumed to be true and words like “stupid” are thrown around.

For the record, if I’m in the workshop part of my garage I’ll use Google Assistant on my phone. If I’m in the car I have my phone automated with Tasker so when I arrive home it pops up a dialog asking if I want to open the garage (positive control). If I’m not at home and need to let the pet sitter into the house, I use the OH app.

You may not have these use cases but I do. And I don’t think I’m stupid for building my OH system to handle all of my use cases however makes sense to me.

And to answer the question @Kim_Andersen brought up about why I’d want to set the thermostat from the top floor?

tl;dr: There is only one thermostat for the whole house. There is only one heater for the whole house and if blows hot air. The house is not well insulated. It is impossible to reach the same temp across all three floors. In winter there is usually a 10 degree F difference from the top floor to the basement, but it’s not always consistent and the three floors change temps at different rates. It is essentially impossible to automate this.

If I’m in bed with a fever and a chill, the only way to raise the temp in the bedroom is to adjust the thermostat on the main floor.

But, instead of assuming I have good reasons for the choices I’ve made, let’s assume in the five years I’ve been using OH and the over 15,000 postings I’ve made to this forum that it never occurred to me that I could automate my heating.