Is there some recommended series of activities or test runs you guys want us to try with the beta app? I’m all ears.
I’m such a Web UI-centric guy that I virtually forget there even is a Vera Mobile app, much less use it on a monthly (or even annual) basis. So some beta-specific requests are very welcome!
On looking at the beta Vera Mobile app, I notice that lots of ‘Notifications’ are being included under ‘Scenes’, which I would not normally expect to see.
For instance, all of my “Battery Low” and lock-related (e.g. “Wrong Code Entered”) warnings appear there – which is neat in a way, since I normally have to visit each device individually to edit these, or to be reminded they exist! – but should they be called ‘Scenes’?
I’m thinking users would be better served if these non-Scene items got lumped into a separate area, called “Notifications” instead. Since that is their intended purpose, after all, plus nobody would ever ‘Run’ these manually or via voice command, as they would with “Scenes”.
As a follow-up to the above, I took the liberty of using the beta app to (a) create a new room “_Notifications”, and (b) assigning a couple of those “No Room” faux scenes to the new room.
After a refresh of my web browser, back on the Vera UI, I noticed this (correctly) causes the moved Scenes to appear and thus become editable from the UI instead of only in the app. That’s a neat “feature” in that it gives users the chance to add lots more events than simply a notification, whenever a “Battery Low” or similar trigger fires.
However, even once these formerly “hidden” Scenes are surfaced in the Vera UI, there is no explicit way to determine which device they are triggered from, since they contain no Device Action(s) or Lua code; you have to rely entirely on the name originally given to it, and hope that sufficiently explains why/when it will run.
P.S. I assert that this adds even more weight to my recent suggestion in “Feature Requests”, that users ought to have a way to “Hide” entire Rooms, or device Types, in the UI – and have those settings persist across multiple visits and be mirrored in the app, etc. – since things get cluttered FAST otherwise!
BUG REPORT: New Scene created in app fails to appear in Vera UI
Today, on a whim, I created a brand new Scene (called 'Test Entering Home Space (#86) – assigned to ‘No Room’) in the beta app, then checked my Vera UI hours later when I got home.
The new scene does NOT appear anywhere under ‘Scenes’ in the UI, but I can confirm it resides somewhere in Vera because I see 'Test Entering Home Space" in the drop-down list Reactor shows me when adding a [Run Scene] action under Activities. It is shown as being assigned to (no room).
Looks like a bug to me. (Make that two bugs … see Update #2, below!)
Libra
UPDATE 1: I can further confirm, after using the beta app to assign the Scene to a different room (“_Zzz”), that it still does not appear in the Vera UI – despite multiple restarts of the Luup engine during testing. Nevertheless, the room assignment appears to have been successful, since once again I can see it listed in Reactor as residing in room “_Zzz”. I will report back with any further findings.
UPDATE 2: On closer inspection of the affected Scene, using the beta app, I notice that it consistently “forgets” the Immediate action (turning on a single Hue light bulb called ‘Fireplace’), thus appears to do nothing when run. Twice I attempted to ‘Edit’ the Scene, specifically editing the list of devices under ‘Immediately’ so as to include ‘Fireplace’, and in each instance, the edit does not persist.
UPDATE 3: Wondering whether the app was causing Scenes to lose integrity, I deliberately edited my favorite Scene (‘Time for Bed’), and can confirm that doing so left that Scene completely empty except for several time delays it had. I must now recreate that Scene from memory.
Will hold off using the beta app any further until these issues are resolved.
@Anna I have a question.
How come this release doesn’t have any known issues? Or did you guys didn’t find any?
The app pretty much crashes at each step and has very obvious bugs.
On my wife’s phone I have 7.40.344 “Temporary downgrade” and that app is better. What happened?
