@bravenel I am enjoying the efforts you and the Hubitat team are putting into the UI and making things easier to configure. With the addition of the App UI to add a new device where you are prompted for Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Virtual, I thought it would be a good idea to create a UI for Notification type devices. I suggest this because:
- I have seen questions from new HE users about adding new notification devices. They are confused about having to add a virtual device first and then setting API credentials.
- Most external notification services require 2 keys to be entered: Pushover has an API Key and User Key, Twilio has an Account SID and Auth Token, etc. If you are creating many of these you are having to enter the same information multiple times which is not ideal.
- Having an app manage this, the credentials can be entered once and propagate to the devices or the devices can refer back to the parent.
- Believe this construct could easily work for most notification type devices
While I have your attention, I had worked with Chuck early on with the Twilio driver as you were phasing out SMS. A company called Plivo competes with Twilio and has a very similar REST API. In fact I was able to quickly leverage my community Twilio driver to make a Plivo driver where it was a simple exercise of changing the API endpoints in each function. You can view that driver here. The addition of an out of the box Plivo driver would be good since their service is a bit cheaper than Twilio.
FWIW, my community Twilio and Plivo drivers have a parent container and child notification device concept to ease the process of setting the API credentials which could go away if you were to implement my idea here of a parent app maintaining the creation of notification devices.
My Twilio driver also includes a feature to "speak" where it will call the phone number and speak text entered. It would also be great to see that be included in the out of the box Twilio driver as well. You can find that driver code here.
Both Twilio and Plivo support "alphanumeric senders" which is a cheaper alternative for those outside the US to use these services and not require a dedicated phone number. My drivers also support that and it would be a nice addition to the out of the box drivers as well.
Thank you in advance for your consideration.
