Rules and Modes

[billgreenwood]

Hi,

I have 4 cameras and today went about setting up rules and modes. 

You have to go into the modes and then set rules for each mode. The current software makes it impossible to reuse pre-exising rules.  

In my case I have an outdoor office at the back of my garden where I switch on the camera at 6pm. Then at 9pm I want the office cam and back garden cam to be active together. Then at 12midnight I want the 2 internal cameras to also switch on for motion sensing.

Now I have set all these up on the schedule, but it was fiddly having to make different modes (for different times). So one for office, then another for office and outdoor, then another for all Cams, then addling these to the schedule.

The real pain was adding the rules for each mode. Surely there should be a central library where you can make rules then add these rules to modes and reuse pre-built rules in other modes.

For a living I sometimes build computer workflows and I though this was too fiddly. Especially for a novice user. I think this is something Netgear should really look into.

[JamesC]

billgreenwood,

Thank you for the feedback. I will forward your concerns with modes/rules organization to the product manager.

We appreciate your contribution to the community!

JamesC

[Schorschi]

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billgreenwood wrote:

The real pain was adding the rules for each mode. Surely there should be a central library where you can make rules then add these rules to modes and reuse pre-built rules in other modes. 

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I agree. In fact, up to a recent system update, the UI was exactly like you describe. One would start by defining rules and could use and reuse rules inside modes. Rules with identical functionality only had to be created once.

I don't know why Netgear changed the UI, but suspect it was due to some users who didn't understand the modes/rules concept to begin with, never bothered trying to comprehend it and instead complained in the forums. Netgear then devised this dumbed-down wizard-like interface, which, unfortunately, removed the ability to reuse existing rules.

I have created an idea in the Idea Exchange requesting the reuse of rules again and encourage you to support it by incrementing its Kudos counter.

[T9001]

Yes, it makes no sense to have it like this. I just discovered this today. It has nearly convinced me to return the whole **** system. It's almost unuseable now after this update. If I want to adjust the sensitivity of my porch camera, not only does it take 9 clicks instead of what used to be 5 due to the sliders being hidden (why?) but I have to repeat this for each Mode? Rubbish. Sounds like a mgmt decision, by people who don't use the system.

It was all perfect before this update, now with nonsense like this it's very hard to use, and your server appears to not like it either...

[jguerdat]

I find it different, not difficult.  Yup, there's another learning curve but for the most part it's not that bad once you've tried out the new locations and settings.  There was a lot of griping about the original layout, too, but that's been swamped recently with the update.  Some folks liked the old layout, others didn't.  Same with the new layout.

It's obvious to some of us who have been around for the past year that some/many of the changes were at least partially motivated by customer complaints.  The Recycle Bin is a prime candidate with lots of complaints about the loss but I haven't heard any complaints like we had before from those who didn't want it due to some sort of privacy concern, to the point of whining about contacting lawyers. 

Probably the biggest issue with the update is the lack of push email notifications about the impending update and how to work with the new interface.  The lack of an online manual for the update is a bit bewildering, to say the least.  In fairness, though, there are a number of articles/FAQs that are available and were from early on to help with the confusion.  Unfortunately, there are a huge number of people who have posted here who haven't read through similar posts to help themselves or used the search function that would have answered many questions without needing to resort to yet another thread.  

At least the angst is slowly dying down...

[Schorschi]

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jguerdat wrote:

I find it different, not difficult.  Yup, there's another learning curve but for the most part it's not that bad once you've tried out the new locations and settings.  There was a lot of griping about the original layout, too, but that's been swamped recently with the update.  Some folks liked the old layout, others didn't.  Same with the new layout.

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I think you're missing the point in this particular case.

Sure, people complained after a lot of things got shuffled in the UI in the recent system update, but in the case of rules not being able to be reused, a major change to the data model in the relationship between modes and rules was applied by the developers.

Like T9001 wrote above, besides it taking more steps to make a change to a rule, we now have to make changes in every mode for each rule that is identical to the one the change is to be applied to.

In other words Netgear have - to use an IT term - denormalized the relationship between modes and rules. So, one cannot anymore make a change to a rule in its single instance that existed before the system update. Now it has to be made in each rule instance in every mode where it's being used, even though each rule's definition is identical.

This is not only inconvenient, to say the least, but defies any common sense and logic.