Chris J. Karr, January 27th, 2009
I’m happy to announce that Shion 2.0b4 is available for download.
(New to Shion? See this page.)
This is the first public beta release of Shion 2, which I talked about here. To recap, I’ll be doing a new beta release every two to three weeks. Once things are stable, I’ll release Shion 2 as a $35 commercial application. Beta testers who report substantial problems that I fix during the beta will be entitled to a free license when Shion goes on sale.
Since 2.0b4 will be the first release for many of you, here are some of the highlights that make it different than the 1.x application:
1. Shion is built on the new Shion Framework and now runs on Mac OS X 10.5 & 10.4. The application works on both PowerPC and Intel Macs.
2. Insteon users can now control X10 devices using their PowerLinc controllers. Users of legacy X10 equipment can control X10 devices using the CM11a (or compatible) serial controller or the CM15a (or compatible) USB controller.
3. Shion now has an “Events” interface that allows users to bind snapshots or AppleScripts to a variety of events. See this post for details.
4. Overall, communication with existing INSTEON equipment should be more robust than in Shion 1.x.
Since this is a beta, there are a handful of known issues with the software that will be addressed in upcoming releases:
1. The application isn’t very robust against sudden hardware disconnections. In a future release, I’ll include code that gracefully recovers from your curious puppy pulling a PowerLinc USB cable out of your computer.
2. I have received some reports of unreasonable latency when commanding X10 devices using the PowerLinc controller. These are under investigation.
3. I plan to include a Log interface that will be helpful in seeing what’s going on behind the scenes and to troubleshoot device connections.
4. There is not yet a feature that will automatically help set up a new Insteon network. You’ll have to manually link the devices yourself.
5. Thermostat support is coming in a later release.
6. An AppleScript interface is under construction. (This will show up before 2.0 goes on sale.)
7. There is no Apple Remote interface at the moment. This feature may show up in a future commercial release once I decide whether to do it myself or work with something like Remote Buddy.
8. There is no option to enable or disable the dock icon.
9. Support for downloading macros and schedules to controllers will be supported in a future release.
10. The application works fine with multiple types of controllers connected at once, but runs into problems when two controllers of the same type (such as 2 CM15As) are connected at the same time.
11. Two-way X10 devices do not yet report their status to Shion.
The focus of this beta test is to find and squash the bugs in the software. If you have new functionality that you’d like to see or new devices supported, please log those requests to the Shion UserVoice forum. For the purpose of the beta test, I’m only rewarding free licenses to those who report problems, not new ideas. (There’ll be a time and place for new ideas.)
If you have any questions or suggestions, please post a comment below.
January 31st, 2009 at 11:55 pm
Do you want bug reports submitted through the UserVoice forum, also?
February 1st, 2009 at 12:59 am
Go ahead and post bug reports in the blot comments. That way everyone else can see them. UserVoice is better for feature requests and random ideas.
February 1st, 2009 at 1:20 am
Sounds good. I’m impressed with what 2.0b4 is so far. I’ll post comments with what I find as I find them…
-The time input field (eg in the scheduled action setup) should either respect the system-wide time format or offer a clicky method of setting the time. I had to find a picture in your blog to see that it was expecting “hh:mm XM” (12 hour only). Ideally, you would just have smarter code validating that field’s input. 19:00, 19.00, 19h00, 7:00 pm, 7:00p, 7pm, etc could all be valid inputs. At the very least, the error dialog should explain what the field was expecting.
February 1st, 2009 at 3:59 am
Thanks for the report. I’ll make that date field a bit more permissive in the next beta release.
February 9th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
-The program seems to be locking up every day or every other day. I’m wading through the system log trying to find a pattern, but Shion creates a truly prodigious amount of log entries! Is there a way, in the next beta, to get Shion to write only to its own logfile? I’m getting about two log entries per second at times, which is making my system log huge and difficult to use for anything else.
-Anyway, back to the lock-up: If I kill the program and restart it, it will sometimes work just fine for another day or so. I’ll try to get some logs for you.
-I’m also seeing an issue where (only at certain times) adjusting the brightness of an Insteon Lamplinc using its configuration page causes the brightness to continually bounce around between different levels until I quit the program. Again, this only happens sometimes, so I’ll be checking the logs for some clue as to why.
February 9th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
I’ll slip in a log functionality in the next release.
As for the lockups: I’ve identified a variety of causes since 2.0b4. These are fixed in 2.0b5. If the problems persist after that release, let me know and I’ll let you know what I need.
I’ve received other reports about the blinking behavior as well. I’m looking into the issue.
Barring any major catastrophes, 2.0b5 should be available later today.