3 ms·

> Though HomeKit overall has been a pretty significant disappointment and definitely feels like one of those semi-afterthought type of Apple projects at this po

> Though HomeKit overall has been a pretty significant disappointment and definitely feels like one of those semi-afterthought type of Apple projects at this point. It's strange because they have clearly spent a LOT of time pushing partner channel development and certification. But the software side, the part that the user actually interacts with, seems so under thought. My random pet peeve is HomeKit garage door controls in CarPlay. If you have multiple garage doors and they are both in HomeKit, you can only see one of your garage doors in CarPlay, and there's not even a way to choose which garage door you see. We have two garage doors but only use one for cars. I wanted to have them both set up as HomeKit devices so that I could see status and get alerts if I left the second one open, but CarPlay decided that it wanted to use the second door, the one I don't use for cars. The only way to get CarPlay to pick the correct door was to completely disable HomeKit on my other garage door.

radicaldreamer 5y ago
This is the same story with Siri...
xoa 5y ago
>It's strange because they have clearly spent a LOT of time pushing partner channel development and certification. But the software side, the part that the user actually interacts with, seems so under thought. Yeah, and strategically it seems pretty important too. Even more so since that area is an important aspect to the future value of not just existing stuff like their watch or siri, but future wearables like AR. And it seems like something that should mesh fairly well with Apple's core competencies and business (unlike, for example, a frigging car). It's also an area with massive privacy and security concerns which should also be a natural extension of some of their efforts. Yet somehow it's just an unpleasant mess. Simultaneously too limiting and yet awkward to work with or troubleshoot. And even stranger, they've put real effort recently into power user automation stuff with their Shortcuts/Automation/Automator items. Guess we're seeing the classic shadow cast by internal organizational politics, power, and attention that's all out of view. May just be another aspect of Apple's organizational structure, which is excellent at singular vertical efforts but mediocre at multitasking.
travisgriggs 5y ago
> It's strange because they have clearly spent a LOT of time pushing partner channel development and certification. But the software side, the part that the user actually interacts with, seems so under thought. This is usually a sign that the MBAs are taking over and playing software developers via spec driven development, the actual software artisans having been reduced to a transpiling transfer function. I don't have any contacts inside of Apple these days; it would be interesting to hear whether developers on the inside are feeling this is the case.
- wronglebowski 5y ago
  Wouldn't they just be pushing the channel to get the fees from certification? Like the made for iPod/iPhone program? The way I see it Apple believes they are entitled to a percentage of all things in life. They can't sell Home automation as a service yet but they can certainly make up some of the cost by gouging their partners to join the ecosystem.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  That’s a good example of self-reinforcing stereotypes or, maybe, correlation without causation. Apple projects get a big team, launch, and then tend to languish because the team moved on to the next thing. “Business types” have little to do with it: as far as we can tell, more or less nothing is happening. That’s not the outcome of a bad strategy, which tends more towards lots of activity with little usefulness. The possible correlation could come from the fact that when development is more or less suspended, the tech people hand over to business because that’s all that is supposed to happen from here on. HomeKit has -art era and customers just like iTunes or the App Store, so it often operates like an ongoing business rather than a software project. There have also been several instances of projects languishing where we know tech people were still in control: Scott Forstall alone ran Siri, Maps, the App Store and iTunes at times where they each saw stagnation at best.
lloeki 5y ago
> My random pet peeve Mine is as follows: The complete inability to set light tint or brightness/turn on or off lights for a whole room at once, except via Siri, but Siri can't set lights to "warm white", only colours (and only if you have colour bulbs, warm<->cool adjustable ones don't count as "colour"). Actually you CAN turn off per room, but doing so requires going to a select room page which is an atrocious experience, who in their right mine swipes through half a dozen pages until they stumble on the right one? Oh, and if you thought about setting backgrounds to identify them quicker, well the backgrounds don't sync across devices. Ah, but they finally added the list of rooms to the menu that is under the top left "home" icon (obviously, that's a menu, right? not to be confused with the bottom left "home" icon which is not), which is not just cramp-inducing to get to, it's also that you can't reorder the room list: creation order or GTFO. Let's not talk about automations which are ridiculously underpowered (whether going through Home or Shortcuts, which are two entirely segregate worlds): every time I have a nice, useful idea it's outright impossible to implement, e.g turn on a given light on a scene/event but turn it off after 10min. Like, a 10min timer is seemingly impossible to implement by the Apple team in any shape or form (as is the "Set wallpaper" action, as a matter of fact) (Apparently some people hacked stuff like setting a timer or an alarm or something and having a second shortcut run on that event. I didn't even try because if I wanted to indulge in such contraptions I would play The Incredible Machine.) Oh, and BTW Adaptive Lighting won't work with my otherwise perfectly adjustable bulbs along the required axis, because reasons. > But the software side, the part that the user actually interacts with, seems so under thought. Have you even tried the Home app on macOS? It's an absolute joke, you so obviously have to emulate touch events with a pointing device it's as usable to save your life as navigating a 3D file manager on Unix. Ah, and so the macOS app is basically the iOS through Catalyst right? So why is it absolutely impossible to set my Mac mini to be a Home Hub, but it is for my iPad which is a) not always home and b) on battery, so may fall out of energy? PS: yes, I tried Home Assistant, which is a nice piece of work, but it's also prone to breakage on updates, and either "develop through a UI" (which doesn't scale) or "mold into the framework and become a contributor" (which is way out of balance). So I've been hacking at CoAP on Ruby and implementing the IKEA Tradfri protocol so that I can have some stupid simple Ruby scripts running on a machine and achieve what I want: circadian lighting (which is a lookup curve plus set the values to only lights that are currently ON) and a couple of dead simple automations (each being about five lines, tops).

radicaldreamer 5y ago

This is the same story with Siri...

xoa 5y ago

>It's strange because they have clearly spent a LOT of time pushing partner channel development and certification. But the software side, the part that the user actually interacts with, seems so under thought. Yeah, and strategically it seems pretty important too. Even more so since that area is an important aspect to the future value of not just existing stuff like their watch or siri, but future wearables like AR. And it seems like something that should mesh fairly well with Apple's core competencies and business (unlike, for example, a frigging car). It's also an area with massive privacy and security concerns which should also be a natural extension of some of their efforts. Yet somehow it's just an unpleasant mess. Simultaneously too limiting and yet awkward to work with or troubleshoot. And even stranger, they've put real effort recently into power user automation stuff with their Shortcuts/Automation/Automator items. Guess we're seeing the classic shadow cast by internal organizational politics, power, and attention that's all out of view. May just be another aspect of Apple's organizational structure, which is excellent at singular vertical efforts but mediocre at multitasking.

travisgriggs 5y ago

> It's strange because they have clearly spent a LOT of time pushing partner channel development and certification. But the software side, the part that the user actually interacts with, seems so under thought. This is usually a sign that the MBAs are taking over and playing software developers via spec driven development, the actual software artisans having been reduced to a transpiling transfer function. I don't have any contacts inside of Apple these days; it would be interesting to hear whether developers on the inside are feeling this is the case.

wronglebowski 5y ago
Wouldn't they just be pushing the channel to get the fees from certification? Like the made for iPod/iPhone program? The way I see it Apple believes they are entitled to a percentage of all things in life. They can't sell Home automation as a service yet but they can certainly make up some of the cost by gouging their partners to join the ecosystem.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
KarlKemp 5y ago
That’s a good example of self-reinforcing stereotypes or, maybe, correlation without causation. Apple projects get a big team, launch, and then tend to languish because the team moved on to the next thing. “Business types” have little to do with it: as far as we can tell, more or less nothing is happening. That’s not the outcome of a bad strategy, which tends more towards lots of activity with little usefulness. The possible correlation could come from the fact that when development is more or less suspended, the tech people hand over to business because that’s all that is supposed to happen from here on. HomeKit has -art era and customers just like iTunes or the App Store, so it often operates like an ongoing business rather than a software project. There have also been several instances of projects languishing where we know tech people were still in control: Scott Forstall alone ran Siri, Maps, the App Store and iTunes at times where they each saw stagnation at best.

lloeki 5y ago

> My random pet peeve Mine is as follows: The complete inability to set light tint or brightness/turn on or off lights for a whole room at once, except via Siri, but Siri can't set lights to "warm white", only colours (and only if you have colour bulbs, warm<->cool adjustable ones don't count as "colour"). Actually you CAN turn off per room, but doing so requires going to a select room page which is an atrocious experience, who in their right mine swipes through half a dozen pages until they stumble on the right one? Oh, and if you thought about setting backgrounds to identify them quicker, well the backgrounds don't sync across devices. Ah, but they finally added the list of rooms to the menu that is under the top left "home" icon (obviously, that's a menu, right? not to be confused with the bottom left "home" icon which is not), which is not just cramp-inducing to get to, it's also that you can't reorder the room list: creation order or GTFO. Let's not talk about automations which are ridiculously underpowered (whether going through Home or Shortcuts, which are two entirely segregate worlds): every time I have a nice, useful idea it's outright impossible to implement, e.g turn on a given light on a scene/event but turn it off after 10min. Like, a 10min timer is seemingly impossible to implement by the Apple team in any shape or form (as is the "Set wallpaper" action, as a matter of fact) (Apparently some people hacked stuff like setting a timer or an alarm or something and having a second shortcut run on that event. I didn't even try because if I wanted to indulge in such contraptions I would play The Incredible Machine.) Oh, and BTW Adaptive Lighting won't work with my otherwise perfectly adjustable bulbs along the required axis, because reasons. > But the software side, the part that the user actually interacts with, seems so under thought. Have you even tried the Home app on macOS? It's an absolute joke, you so obviously have to emulate touch events with a pointing device it's as usable to save your life as navigating a 3D file manager on Unix. Ah, and so the macOS app is basically the iOS through Catalyst right? So why is it absolutely impossible to set my Mac mini to be a Home Hub, but it is for my iPad which is a) not always home and b) on battery, so may fall out of energy? PS: yes, I tried Home Assistant, which is a nice piece of work, but it's also prone to breakage on updates, and either "develop through a UI" (which doesn't scale) or "mold into the framework and become a contributor" (which is way out of balance). So I've been hacking at CoAP on Ruby and implementing the IKEA Tradfri protocol so that I can have some stupid simple Ruby scripts running on a machine and achieve what I want: circadian lighting (which is a lookup curve plus set the values to only lights that are currently ON) and a couple of dead simple automations (each being about five lines, tops).