Mac Home Automation

This is a beta release of the next XTension version 9.5.6. There are no time limits or other limitations on the software that could cause you trouble. No database changes are made and if you experience any problems from it you can return to the release version just be replacing the app.

This app may include debug logging that may not be important to whatever you are doing. If you are not experiencing any related issues please just ignore any debug logging unless I need to ask you for it for a specific purpose.

• NEW: Calix Gigaspire Plugin. At this moment you can create units for the main device and any satellite devices. The only command currently supported is to tell the individual Units to reboot().
• NEW Camera Control plugin for REOLink cameras. This is not complete yet as it’s taking more time than it should to figure out how to get alarm events from the things. Right now you can set the various picture parameters like changing the brightness or contrast and such. There is not yet any documentation for this so if you wish to use it in the short term let me know I can send you a list of the currently supported commands.
• NEW: Plugins, this is a difficult one to summarize. Packets from plugins can now be marked as “Ephemeral” this means that if there is a pause in the app and many commands of that type are received while the program is held out by a script only the most recent one will be processed. The only place this is currently in use is with the video plugins. Recording is handled by the plugin itself, but if the stream is being viewed in anything connected to XTension it can possibly be sending a lot of frames every second. If the app pauses to finish a complicated script a lot of frames could build up to be processed making it take even longer to return to normal after a hold out. Now any frames received are replaced by the newer one as they are received so only a single one for each stream will be shown when the program finishes being held out by a script.
• NEW: A new debug option to log script execution times, but only if they are above a certain value. This can be found in the debug menu if you have it enabled. When selected you can enter a millisecond value and if a script takes more than that amount of time it will log it. This is much better than the old way of just logging absolutely everything even if it took no time at all. This can be very helpful to figure out when a script is doing something that might be taking long enough to cause other problems.
• Hubitat: Added the “HumanMotionState” parameter to the hubitat plugin as it is used by some of the newer human presence detector devices that are now supported by the hub.
• FIX: The “Revert” menu in the toolbar of the edit script window might have loaded the previous script text without properly setting the text encoding type and some glyphs would show as garbage or other error characters rather than what they really are.
• FIX: The Create Unit verb now properly sets the device type name so that it will know it is a pseudo before you manually edit it.
• FIX: The hubitat interface will no longer sometimes think you are using a remote connection rather than a local one to the Hubitat.
• FIX: Fixed a potential problem when saving the database that could log errors during updating certain rarely used database entries.
• FIX: Fixed a problem drawing “Never” in the Last Activity column of a list window. Previously there were cases where it would display the earliest unix date instead of just never.
• FIX: The “recent values” list and display in the Edit Unit’s advanced tab will no longer use scientific notation when the numbers get large. This could cause issues if you were using the recent values verb to get these numbers or trying to change them while editing a unit.
• BETA: The disk space check will now run more slowly in the background to try to not slow down the app when it is necessary to read thousands of files and delete the oldest ones to clear up space.
• removed the check for external changes step from running an AppleScript. I’m not aware of anyone that is still using an external editor for scripts in XTension so this let the scripts to run not insignificantly faster. If you’re still using the script editor or another tool please let me know about that.
• Added many debug pseudos that can be created to track the time it takes to run various parts of the regular heartbeat actions of the app. This was looking for problems that turned out to be an entirely different issue but are still available if you are experiencing some timing or slowdown issues. Let me know and I can direct you how to do this in a way to possibly collect some useful information.
• Increased the script run count before the applescript system is recycled. I suspected this was causing some of the slowdowns, but it wasn’t. Doing this less often does cause fewer pauses in the running of the app as it can take a second or so to run if you have a lot of scripts.
• Added several of the older debug options that were accessible through double secret scripting commands to the debug menu for easier using of them when it is necessary to collect more info about specific things. Dont experiment with these too much without instructions as you are likely to cause more problems than you solve.
• If a script is run via the command line or the Do Script scheduled event they will have this information in the “thisScript” value if they cause the error handler script to be run for any reason. This will make it easier to figure out where the error is coming from.
• Video display windows now recognize when you use the close menu item or command-close shortcut.
• The Log USB Events option in the logging tab of the preferences window will now cause the log to be flushed to disk immediately upon logging the addition or removal of a USB device. This can be very helpful when debugging a non-XTension problem with the machine as you have a much better chance of catching that a disk removed itself for a few milliseconds causing a system crash or kernel panic than you would before.

XTension 9.5.6 build 1095 12/14/2024