One of the biggest blockers for me moving all my lights from being automated through SmartThings, Google Home, or Hue’s app is just the UI for managing colors. I would assume that it’s the way it is because it’s something that works for developers, but the current UI is just… really complex where others are straightforward even if they’re definitely not perfect.
It would be really, really, really nice if this kind of UI were more approachable for the layperson.
Do you have a screenshot of what you like or think could be better?
(Could be a googled image), just to make it more visual clear on what you mean.
I think what could be a solution is adding light presets, akin to what Apple does with its Home app:
So clicking on any of the presets sets the colour and brightness of the light.
If that’s too out there - Perhaps the light UI could integrate with scenes, and surface any scene that uses that light for easy activation within the light UI
I liked the way Hue did it with Rooms of lights. You have one color wheel but you moved the light itself around the wheel. If we have the lights in the rooms maybe a new Light Entity you can trigger that brings up a interface like that.
Because you have to open that interface for each light, unlike the Hue one you can move each light on the same screen to fine tune the room.
Hue and Apple have already been dropped here. Here’s Google Home for posterity:
(I can’t post more because of the new users limitation around one image per post)
I specifically think that refinement around making the lighting more along the lines of something someone would use in their home as opposed to a color selector in the sense of general design would be an incredible enhancement. You’ll note that pretty consistently across other tools, there’s a wide selection of slight variations of warm + cool lights as the most accessible options, rather than focusing on the full RGB spectrum. I generally end up going through all of those and finding a few I like and then setting up scenes in each room to automate turning them off/on/up/down.
