Red Gears, blue switches and other icons in the new UI...(no longer "!" icons)

Community Playground General Discussions
1

Since the new firmware, I’ve been able to add my kitchen dimmer, and it actually works.
Makes me happy. But both it and the dining room dimmer have red gears. “Configure node right now” which seemed to help the “!” once and a while doesn’t appear to do much.
Anything else I can try to properly configure the nodes?

and while we are on icons… I’m assuming the green gear is for a node that’s configured and ready to go,
but there are icons of various colors that seem to come and go, seems like they denote an command that has been sent, but some odd things…

  1. when switching off a switch, it looks like a and a switch icon show up then a rotating power button.
    does the color of the icons matter? I’ve seen blue, green and red.

  2. I don’t always get the little power button on the dimmers, and add to it’s possibilities a purple color.

  3. are pollings done randomly? why would I have a polling icon for one device and not another. it doesn’t seem to match up to sent commands other than polling all nodes, which shows me my one green lamp module and my 2 red dimmers. Since the icon looks like an edit or journal thing with it’s pencil, I’d expect it to bring up a log or something to view or edit.

As for the UI in general… I was expecting a new UI rather than shaded graphics added to the old UI and changing the icons. The selected button on the left is hard to read when selected. It’s not impossible and yes we know what it is, but it’s not better design. Something more responsive would be nice, also being able to collect together multiple commands before execution (ever try to delete multiple devices… it takes a while) Having a slider for the dimmers or maybe a 1-10 scale rather than the large increments.

Looking at the dashboard, it takes up a whole page to show 3 different rooms, each with one device. We can find a better, more efficient layout (maybe a simple/advanced toggle) I don’t need a giant icon telling me something is a dimmer switch… it has the dimmer controls next to it.

I’m done complaining for now,
Help withe the red gears would be appreciated.
Maybe a posting in the wiki that goes through and details all the icons and options in the UI.
…and one day, some real detailed documentation.

thanks,
Rick

2

I agree. New UI is nicer, but layout isn’t really state of the art - it takes way too much screen space, as a result too much scrolling required. But as it is now, I can live with it

As for performance… it’s a pain, I suppose it’s somehow related to the fact the messaging inherited from the older codebase, which isn’t really an excuse.
I would seriously suggest Micasaverde to take an alternative product, such as ThinkEssentials, and simply play with it to see response time of UI, how less time z-wave actions take there, etc. Vera has tons of advantages over this and other competitors, but it would be nice to know why it’s so much slower, and if anything can be done about it.