Deane Johnson said:
...
People go towards what is pretty. Web sites, printed material, TV, politicians, whatever. The first thing that has to be done is to "look pretty". I know most everyone on here has looked at the CastleOS site. You have to admit, the site gets your attention because it looks positive, pretty and easy to do. Whether it ultimately does everything the site leads you to believe is yet to be seen, but your initial hit is positive. ..
My "initial hit" was: "more sizzle than steak". Great presentation but when I look under the hood I can't find substance. What do I call substance?
Documentation and Examples
I was unable to find detailed documentation for the product. Even in Elve's early days, one could find a modest amount of documentation. What does exist shows great breadth but little depth such as: How to transfer the software license from one PC to another, how to do very basic setup (login, create a user account, create a device), how to identify the neutral wire, how to access the software via the Internet, etc. There is a post
describing an installation that failed because the product requires port 80 and it was already in use by another application. It seems there are no installation instructions indicating port 80 is required nor does the installer appear to correctly handle the situation when the port is unavailable. Without documentation, I don't know much about the product's architecture (and strengths and limitations).
API
None yet. I imagine it is needed in order to write a custom driver. However, I'm not sure about this because drivers are not documented. What I have read is that people write C# code ("scripts") to talk directly to unsupported devices ("driverless" communication).
Support Forum
There aren't many posts on the support forum; about 400 posts over 2.25 years. Many deal with reliability issues and new feature requests which is typical for a new product. Some recent posts, penned by people who appear to have spent some time with the product,
are best characterized as jaded. Posts like this one
concerning the functionality of timers (found in all the HA software I've ever evaluated ... at least six), makes me wonder what other functionality is missing. This post's comment about the
inability of modifying a portion of an existing event is not a limitation I've seen in other HA software (certainly not in the one I use).
Moving on ...
The heated exchange about HomeKit (in another thread) made me do my own research. I read several articles but I think I found one that summarizes it best. Who would have a deep interest in HomeKit? Indigo Domotics of course! They make Indigo, HA software that runs on a Mac.
HomeKit is summarized in this announcement and it's clearly designed to permit iDevices (iPod, IPhone, iPad) to control Apple-blessed "accessories" (Apple approved 3rd party hardware devices controllable by the Homekit protocol). iOS8 effectively contains a shared database of the user's HomeKit-aware accessories allowing any of the user's iDevices to control them. Siri can be instructed to control them. Yes, Apple will allow control of some existing HA hardware through the use of a hardware bridge (like the Insteon Hub Pro). The "hardware" qualifier is important because, currently,
Apple will not permit software bridges. That detail is
revealed in a second announcement by Indigo Domotics where they sadly explain to their customers that Indigo, despite being software that runs on a Mac, is considered a "
software bridge" and is not an approved means of bridging. There's more but I'll let you read it yourself.