We all have other jobs, but most of us here manage to contribute and help out in our spare time, and we aren’t even paid for it!
If the MCV team is growing so much, then why doesn’t anyone else other than Florin seem to post?
Florin has helped me personally more than once, and for that I am grateful. But I’ve received far more help from the unpaid volunteers (read: users & forum participants) whose interest is in advancing this home automation protocol. This is not unique to MiCasaVerde, don’t get me wrong. The same goes for, uhm, Windows 7. Apple. BMW, Subaru, Toyota, Pioneer Electronics… any number of products whose post-purchase support is supplemented by user discussion forums. But that’s not the point…
My intention isn’t to disparage MCV. I recommend Vera to everyone. I’ve posted my own “home automation” threads in completely unrelated discussion boards to tout the advantages of using home automation (and Z-wave is all I use, currently). People that come to my house are amazed by the automation I’ve implemented. My friends love it–as a gimmick. And it’s only a gimmick, as well as a completely foreign concept to anyone that doesn’t lean toward the “highly technical.” It’s just like X10 was years ago, and without excellent support it’ll face the same fate. It requires a LOT of screwing with to get it to work correctly. Until things “just work,” there is likely not to be general support/appeal for Vera.
On the subject of UI5, I made the plunge–for about a day. It didn’t work, at all. I’m back to UI4, and pleased enough with it (after incalculable hours of “tweaking”). Although I haven’t explicitly said this, I’m part of the “what are they developing” camp. I don’t really know what you guys do. Right now, I don’t have any express need to upgrade anything, and it’s a good thing, in my mind–because the only major release I’ve experienced from MCV was a major flop. I wish that weren’t the case.
I think you should look at this forum as a group of eager consumers who really want to learn about the product, share their experiences, and see MCV succeed. I might be going out on a limb, but I think everyone wants that.
@ MCV,
I think my “what are they coding” remark was and is valid. I am a Vera 2 user and I’m on UI 4 after an excruciating debacle with UI 5 that lasted about a day. I imagine that a lot of energy has gone into UI 5. Why was this energy not directed toward making UI 4 more complete before the advent of a new interface? As far as I can tell UI 5 is broken in comparison to UI 4, which has it’s fair share of issues. I would like to see all of the bugs in UI 4 fixed. Simple things like scenes for setting a temperature consistently don’t work for me. I have never made any complaints about MCV aside from the poor move to UI 5. I never said an ill word at all before my horrible experience. I’m not going to buy a Vera 3 because you can’t make UI 5 work on Vera 2. I already spent money on it. If I spend an additional $300, or whatever it costs, I will have forked out more than I would have if I had initially gone with HomeSeer. I didn’t go with HomeSeer due to it’s higher cost. I thought Vera would be able to handle everything I would be doing. That was a mistake on my part. UI 5 is a disaster. When you say that you have hired more people and are coding around the clock I have little respect because this effort is all invested in UI 5. You probably wouldn’t have had to hire all of these people if you had continued working on UI 4 and not broken your product with a useless update to begin with. I no longer recommend Vera to anyone. I recommend HomeSeer. The higher price tag is what you have to pay for a working system that does more than control lights and door locks.
First of all i’d like to wish AP15e well in his new life, it’s unfortunate that MCV or his fellow Vera users were unable to persuade him to change his mind.
Skimming through the posts here, there are a lot of negatives and I will admit to waiting quite a while before jumping on the HA bandwagon and i choose MCV because I liked the look/drive and feel and an element of that, was this Forum Community.
In today’s world I don’t just buy a device, I buy the experience and future direction that comes with it too, and it is always a balance, with the bad bits offset by the good. But the risk is always there, that the good can no longer counterbalance the bad…
On a personal note, I work in IT, in a role that requires me to manage the application development, test, release etc requirements of my customers, I cant code/design, but I front the customer and end user experience. In my little time as a user, i can see the MiOS/Vera platform is not the fully rounded and stable solution i hoped it would be - some simple things done poorly - but i can see it evolving.
So in summary, the MCV modrators like Mcvflorin, and contributors like AP15e are for me my front line experience of HA and the MCV world, they do a great job and this forum saves god knows how many calls to a help desk for some of the basics, let alone the R&D they bring too. But it’s also more than that, i and i believe the community want to feel part of the MCV experience, part of the family, assusting the growth and if you can help cultivate that - I firmly believe you will continue to have a rock solid foundation to build from.
Apple & Sonos are two products I thoroughly enjoy on numerous levels,
I firmly believe MCV are in a market of great potential, and I’d really like to see you up there with the above names too.
I continue to root for Vera’s success and love the potential but unfortunately agree with the sentiments above. There was, a while back, a promise to do a final update to UI4 which I think is owed to those who bought V2 as it is known that UI5 has limitations on V2. This seems to have been left in the dust. I also believe if we had spent all the energy on a rock solid UI4 we would be in a better place right now though that is opinion and I have neither business nor programming expertiese. UI5 is officially considered to be superior to UI4 and indeed it has added some important functionality but it is still full of quirks in basic functionality not to mention the gawd-awful giant icons we have all resigned ourselves to. To this day new bugs are being introduced with new functionalty, it is a moving target and we never seem to arrive. Still in MCV’s corner but well understanding the prevailing frustration. Just my 2 cents
I understand the reaction of Ap15e and also that of MCV
I think that the best solutions are:
-
The plugin developers create pages of gift to thank them for their hard work for the community.
-
CVD provide real documentation for developers and apprentices ^ ^
Given the enormous services that have made me both developers and Ap15e guessed, I find that these two normal people (and others of course) to receive donations from users.
IMO.
As this is a good enough place than any other, I wanted to make my 2000th post here. Though there have been ups and downs with MCV, you have to give them credit for trying. They are a small company and have a lot on their plate. Yes, they need to improve on things and re-work their priorities. But I have a good feeling that they will be here for quite some time and I for one will be here for the ride. I have been using Vera for over 2 years and used every release but UI3. I am looking forward to what is to come in the future of MCv.
- Garrett
[quote=“garrettwp, post:62, topic:171421”]As this is a good enough place than any other, I wanted to make my 2000th post here. Though there have been ups and downs with MCV, you have to give them credit for trying. They are a small company and have a lot on their plate. Yes, they need to improve on things and re-work their priorities. But I have a good feeling that they will be here for quite some time and I for one will be here for the ride. I have been using Vera for over 2 years and used every release but UI3. I am looking forward to what is to come in the future of MCv.
- Garrett[/quote]
Nice! And thank you for all your help! ;D
This kind of discussion has been held a lot of times in this forum already. But never ever has anything changed due to users complaining.
I have become completely inactive in this forum, it just does not help me to invest hours and hours to re-answer very basic questions, I have no profit at all. And you cant blame it on the users, how should they be able to find things an wiki where half of the information is about a completely outdated UI (UI3).
I will not be releasing the unreleased plugins I coded. For example I am using my own XBMC plugin and I have some others in work. I am not releasing them because all I get is more questions and support and feature requests. After I released 3 plugins to the appstore, Micasa Verde did not even provide me a Vera for free, I got a 90 dollar refund on it, great (=>FY).
I will do just like MCV and the biggest part of the users, I just sometimes have a look on the forum and I profit if I feel like it.
BYE
There seems to be a lot of talk in this thread. I think some action would help greatly.
I actually stumbled across this thread when I found out that a bug I found today was reported by Ap15e more than a year ago. see http://bugs.micasaverde.com/view.php?id=1444
It was to my great surprise closed without resolution. It was reopened today as a result of my findings, see http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,4991.msg76940.html#msg76940
My question is, how fast can this bug be resolved?
Please provide a planned release date. And please confirm this for all vera devices and all UI versions.
The bug is easy to fix, at least in theory. The Evaluate() function converts the arguments from string to int using atoi(). Changing atoi() to atof() should be enough to fix it, but we fear this may break something somewhere else in the code. This little change requires a lot of testing, and we don’t have the time for this now. The best time for a change like this is when developing a new UI version, because there’s plenty of time for testing.
The bug is easy to fix, at least in theory. The Evaluate() function converts the arguments from string to int using atoi(). Changing atoi() to atof() should be enough to fix it, but we fear this may break something somewhere else in the code. This little change requires a lot of testing, and we don’t have the time for this now. The best time for a change like this is when developing a new UI version, because there’s plenty of time for testing.[/quote]
Strongly disagree. You guys have conflated functionailty with “UI”. In a well-designed system, they’d be as well-separated as can be. Fixing bugs in functionality while churning the UI just means you have more variables to solve for with fewer equations than if you did them separately.
I think most here would agree–there’s no reason to keep changing the UI until everything that can reasonably be made to work correctly does so. You’re working on the wrong thing as your priority.
–Richard
Not to add to the fray, but I’d also like to submit my vote for completing the Elk plugin.
I chose the Elk panel based on their strong user base and interoperability with Vera, not knowing how limited the interaction between the two systems are.
The Vera is lower cost than a (VRC0P + M1XZW for making and Elk z wave capable), so it’s a great solution and a cost saver (not to discount the multitude of other benefits that come with the Vera). I actually bought the z wave stuff for my Elk so that I could have it disarm when a valid lock code was entered, but I got the Vera to do the same thing and was so pleased with how it worked that I sent back the VRC0P & M1XZW without ever using them. I just wish I could access everything on the Elk such as output relays.
[quote=“rlmalisz, post:67, topic:171421”]I think most here would agree–there’s no reason to keep changing the UI until everything that can reasonably be made to work correctly does so. You’re working on the wrong thing as your priority.
–Richard[/quote]
I have to agree with this statement. I’m an electrical engineer in the semiconductor industry and I’ve been involved in product development for over 25 years now (yes, I’m old). You don’t work on a new UI while the underlying code base has issues. These should be fixed before limited resources are poured into a new interface. And proper documentation would make every user’s experience better.
Put the resources into making the product stable and usable FIRST, then work on a new UI. MCV has their priorities backwards.
While its certainly seems fun to single out MCV for working on one thing while you feel they should be working on the other… I have to wonder how many of these posters are gleefully running Microsoft Windows … An OS that is just riddled with bad foundation blocks and yet gets a whiz bang UI overhaul every year or so.
And while everyone can say … “Not Me” Windows owns 80% plus of the desktop … So somebody has to be booting into it.
And I’m not calling out just MS… Adobe, Apple, Norton and a boatload of other developers can be called out for the very same thing. Like it or not a sexy new look always sell 1000% more than a fine tuned brain.
[quote=“DaveGee, post:70, topic:171421”]While its certainly seems fun to single out MCV for working on one thing while you feel they should be working on the other… I have to wonder how many of these posters are gleefully running Microsoft Windows … An OS that is just riddled with bad foundation blocks and yet gets a whiz bang UI overhaul every year or so.
And while everyone can say … “Not Me” Windows owns 80% plus of the desktop … So somebody has to be booting into it.
And I’m not calling out just MS… Adobe, Apple, Norton and a boatload of other developers can be called out for the very same thing. Like it or not a sexy new look always sell 1000% more than a fine tuned brain.[/quote]
It’s not “fun”, and they’re not being singled out. Yes, a lot of software development effort at a lot of places goes to glitz and not to substance. But this forum is about their product. I think it could be a lot better than it is. You mention MS (whose stuff I only run when it’s unavoidable–like for Quicken). They made a similar mistake when they pushed the IE guts down into the OS, but their mistake was calculated, whereas I think MCV is just overreaching.
I won’t run stuff that is not stable just because it’s pretty. I’m a software engineer (and architect). I’m still hanging on to my V2 running UI4. It’s not perfect, but I understand its issues and limitations. MCV made what appear to be a lot of superfluous changes in their move to V3 and UI5 that I am certain they don’t yet understand the issues and limitations in that setup.
Form follows function. I get that Z-wave devices and protocols make Bluetooth stuff look rock-solid (it’s not). I realize that trying to get a random assemblage of Z-wave and other device types to behave as a stable system is really hard. But unless there was some fundamental flaw in the prior design, making massive changes (including
GUI changes) isn’t likely to result in more stability. As products mature, the design oscillations dampen.
The MCV approach makes it look like they consider each new rev of their product (and new UI) a new, distinct product. They don’t pitch it that way, but that seems to be the net result. If that’s the case, the products never mature, and the osciallation never dampens. Which is what we’re seeing. I’d prefer to see something else.
–Richard
The comparison between Vera and desktop operating systems is inaccurate. Most people use Windows because it’s more functional than open source alternatives. Not because of it’s fancy GUI. I think most people are using Vera because it’s cheap. I personally find UI 5 to be less attractive and intuitive than UI 4.
[quote=“chixxi, post:64, topic:171421”]This kind of discussion has been held a lot of times in this forum already. But never ever has anything changed due to users complaining.
I have become completely inactive in this forum, it just does not help me to invest hours and hours to re-answer very basic questions, I have no profit at all. And you cant blame it on the users, how should they be able to find things an wiki where half of the information is about a completely outdated UI (UI3).
I will not be releasing the unreleased plugins I coded. For example I am using my own XBMC plugin and I have some others in work. I am not releasing them because all I get is more questions and support and feature requests. After I released 3 plugins to the appstore, Micasa Verde did not even provide me a Vera for free, I got a 90 dollar refund on it, great (=>FY).
I will do just like MCV and the biggest part of the users, I just sometimes have a look on the forum and I profit if I feel like it.
BYE[/quote]
Chixxi,
While I understand (and sympathize) your points, instead of getting frustrated and quitting - a change of approach/perspective could make you happy.
What you are experiencing is exactly the same as all valued community members that do development… perfect example is the skinners/addon coders at XBMC. They are constantly hounded by users with requests… this just happens.
The coders do what they do for 2 reasons… 1) they want the code for themselves & 2) they want to help the community – if you don’t care about these, don’t do it.
If you do care then take the user requests for what they are… requests. No one has a gun to your head. Do it if you think it would be fun/needed/etc… don’t if you don’t.
Threatening MCV has proven useless… it seems they are simply too stupid to care, or know why they SHOULD CARE. Oh well… the device and our general user base are good people and the sharing is active… don’t be like MCV and shun the people who care and appreciate you and your work the most… the users.
I used to code UIs and scripts for XBMC, Homeseer, and NetRemote (if anyone here ever used it)… when I had more time. I shared it all, freely and got nothing from it but the satisfaction that I helps MANY people… and in several cases others took that code, changed/enhanced it, and that helped even more people.
The Vera as a device is great… yes, the MCV has a serious case of ‘la cabeza en el culo’ when it comes to their own development priorities. But don’t let that stop us from making it better ourselves and taking advantage of the bets platform on the market, for the price - by far. Trust me, I’ve used MOST of them.
Sorry to see you go, but I fully understand. Vera “was” a good idea that is dying on the vine. I posted a question in upgrading about any word on updates, and fixes or other platforms. got 75 views and not a peep of response. I am very frustrated with the product, its not mainstream as touted in the advertisements. It’s techie equipment - and I am a techie, but at some point the time to benefit is not there. example, spend 100 hours getting basic functions to work, vice go and manually switch the light or thermostat. Well in my life I would never spend 100 hours at the thermostat, but it sure is easy to burn 100 hours getting vera to work even semi correectly.
Personally I think this is a pretty stupid comparison. Most people, myself including, don’t have a choice what OS they run. I work for a Fortune-50 company that requires I use Windows-based software. I don’t have a choice. And I run Windows at home because I need to be compatible with work. I would dump Microsoft in a heartbeat if I could.
MCV is not Microsoft (although their attitude seems very MS-like at times). They are a small company in a niche market that will likely go out of business if they piss off their customer base too much. Most successful small companies are very responsive to the needs and concerns of their customers. That’s what makes them successful.