Procrastinate

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I've had a very long software development career that started back at times of punch cards. So I know more than many how tempting it is to jump on to implement that new brilliant idea. And when it is more or less working, I have another brilliant idea so I jump on that one too. It does not take much time to create a feature rich application that is impossible to use, impossible to maintain and it all goes to trashcan.
Unfortunately I see the same thing with Hubitat. It might have brilliant back end but who can see it behind that user interface. I tried to add a new zwave device after half year break and it is just amazing how unintuitive and simply buggy UI is. Simple thing, try removing a tile from dashboard. It succeeds, no error but the tile is still there. Try again, it is still there. I wonder if I need to press that strange green checkbox icon that for some reason has not tooltip, and yes ! that refreshes the page and the tile I removed is gone ...... together with another tile that I did not want to remove ... Sheeh !
Or who is this age arranges tiles by clicking up/down/left/right buttons, Drag&drop was invented decades ago. Try to add a tile between existing tiles, you will see what I mean.
I have tons of such examples, too much to list.
What I think should be done the UI should be redesigned from scratch, do not try to reuse any existing code it will backfire.

It is a rather simple front end so should not take much time. And please do make sure you have unit tests for most actions, I feel you do not as some new bugs appear after updates.
Is this too much to ask ?

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:popcorn: can’t wait to see this thread progress

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We agree with this.

There is somewhat of a dilemma in this: With respect to the UI in general, I agree with you. There is a subset of the UI that defines a device page ui, and another that defines the framework for apps. If we toss out the latter, we have to toss out all of the apps and redo them. While that might be a nice long term goal, it's not a practical way to proceed.

So, overall, this is a somewhat more complex problem set than meets the eye. We are proceeding down the path of redoing major aspects of the UI. One of them, that you refer to, has to do with adding a new device. That one is mostly done, but didn't make the cut for this 2.2.8 release. We will proceed forward with this effort.

Thanks for your feedback.

Have you noticed any of the significant steps taken recently? Rooms, devices in the mobile app, etc.

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Always so easy to tell someone else their job is simple :joy: UI redesigns are HUGE efforts that have tons of side consequences. You get to rewrite all your documentation. Re-record all your tutorial videos. We had a guy at one company I worked for we referred to as “Can’t ya Just” because he’s make every software change sound so simple “can’t ya just …”. Well as you pointed out with their bad UI, if you don’t put a lot of thought, design, and architecture into it (that is - a lot of work) you’ll just get a new unintuitive UI! I agree the UI is ugly and the UX isn’t great. But I already know how to use it. I’d rather them add support for other protocols to implement new device types and more user functionality than spend many hours redesigning the UI. But that’s just my 2 cents!

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image

pass the butter

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I’m curious about the relevance of the thread title (“Procrastinate”) to the points brought up in the OP?

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Perhaps the OP is procrastinating coming up with a different thread title.