Not sure if this has been suggested before or not. I couldn’t find mention of it.
I would find it very helpful if the Advanced Flow editor had the ability to draw straight lines, and simple shapes (rectangles, ovals, cloud) that you could resize and change colour of. That would sit on-top of the grid, but behind your Flow. This would be helpful with creating more complex Flows, as you could organise them, or visually separate different parts of your Advanced Flow.
I have terminal OCD. I just put some white space in between different sections of my advanced flows, and use notes to give clear indications of what’s what. No need for drawings of any sort.
I already do that. But screen space is limited, so with some of (who am I kidding, many of) my advanced flows, there just isn’t space to leave black spaces, or add notes for each part.
Simple lines and shapes would be useful to some, and don’t have to be used if you prefer not to. It would be personal preference. But the option would be nice.
I have never noticed that space is limited. For many of my flows, I need to scroll a lot though. Even on my huge screen. You can also set the zoom lower, like 80%. That’s still readable but a lot more fits on the screen. But I have never, NEVER, hit a limit on the size of my flows.
My point exactly. I prefer to keep as much as possible on my large display screen visible at one time. Scrolling for miles is when things start to go awry.
I have mine set to 67%… and I still run out of space on a single screen. Which is why I break Flows down in to smaller sub-Flows. And why I would like to see a feature like simple line and shape drawing… maybe even change the background colour of an area. It’s just how my Aspergers brain works.
I have broken some flows down into smaller sections by setting a variable and looking for that variable change in the sub-flow. That works well. You can also start sub-flows from your flow and the original flow will wait for completion of the sub-flow, which is a strategy that works in some cases. I do that not for space considerations (I don’t mind scrolling, I have a mouse with an excellent scroll wheel) but to keep things nicely organised and maintainable. 67% seems small, I already need reading glasses for 80% on my 29" 4k monitor
Sorry but you’re not going to be able to convince me otherwise. No matter how hard you try. Partly because I have probably already tried… Partly because it’s just how my weird logic Aspergers brain works… make it more disability friendly.
I already use the Advanced Triggers app quite extensively to start, and sometimes wait for sub-Flows. And I extensively use Homey variables, starting using BLL variables, use the Device Capabilities app Advanced Virtual Devices. Many different techniques. But that’s not the case I was trying to make, it was more around my Aspergers and Dyslexia, that the ability to use line drawing and background colours to break up certain different parts of Advanced Flows would be helpful for my disability.
I can’t fit a bigger monitor in at my desk (it’s already wall mounted to save space. But sometimes I use a browser on a Raspberry Pi 5 I have hooked up to my 55” 4K TV… I think that is big enough no?
No, I agree it would be nice if there would be some organizational tools available, like you suggest to visualize e.g. sections that belong to each other.
One note though: when flows get really large, and depending on the flowcards used, the Advanced Flow editor tends to get slower and slower until it locks up. The only work-around then seems to be to split up the flow in multiple ones.
I have found this too… and it is extremely frustrating.
But the one that really irks me is in an entry field when you click on the tag icon and then have to sit and wait for an absolute age before the list appears… this is particularly annoying when you need more than one tag from a device (why can’t you select multiple tags at once to save keep having to reload the list… the time saving would be MAHOOSIVE!!)
Maybe, if you feel like it, you could gather all these little and larger annoyances and combine them in a support ticket to Athom. As far as I know they put all such suggestions on their todo list.
Though there is no guarantee that they’ll actually implement it. I never know to what extent Athom reads these forum topics and transfers suggestions and ideas to their internal list. It seems a support ticket is more ‘in their face’ than these posts.
In Dutch we have a saying which literally reads ‘No is what you’ve got, Yes is what you can get’ (you never know until you ask). You might give it a shot .
Maybe one suggestion could be a more transparent dev roadmap? I have no idea if they even read this section, and if they do, which suggestions make it to the backlog and which ones are rejected.
I hear ya. Maybe if they made Notes resizable. I often find myself messing around with multiple Notes to achieve a similar effect, but that’s actually really crap. You also don’t have “foreground” or “background” to change the order of cards, meaning you have to start with notes and then put other cards on top.
So whatever they add as colour or drawing stuff, they also need to add that you can change the order.
Or just right click on the card and select duplicate… the new duplicate with all the same settings is now in the foreground of any existing notes cards and can replace the old card that was behind it
That’s simple enough, just make all lines/coloured shapes in the same layer as the background grid, because you’re never going to want them on top of cards hiding them, that would be a nightmare in the making
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