Mac Home Automation

XTension 9.5.7 beta 1 is available. Note this is beta software and definitely contains bugs, hopefully fewer than the last release without adding too many more.

Download: XTension 9.5.7b1 (329M) 3/6/2026

• FIX: “Average the last “N” Values” in the Advanced tab of the Edit Unit dialog will now properly recognize and handle negative values. Note that it cannot correct previously incorrect values, but future ones will preserve their positive/negativeness.
• NEW: New global scripts “Spring Forward Script” and “Fall Back Script” will be run when the computer detects that daylight savings has started or ended. These kinds of changes are hard to test since it is months between real situations. If I wake up this Sunday morning and my bedroom clock shows the right time then I’ll know it worked for me. If you can please go ahead and set these up to do something useful for you. There isn’t a lot of time before it happens again.
• Changes to the Async Shell commands:
  • FIX: When the shell is complete and it calls back into the script that started it the ThisUnit/ThisScript/ThisInterface globals will be set properly. So those variables can be used in the script and the log file will be filterable by them and show the results as expected.
  • If an async shell call exceeds it’s timeout a hard kill -9 is sent to the process better making sure that it is not hung up forever.
• Hubitat Plugin:
  • Dim/Brighten commands now properly honor the rate parameter. This only works if the specific device you are controlling also supports it.
  • The hubitat interface can send bogus values, or just not send any values at all for the current level of a unit after you control it. In order to keep the database in XTension in sync with the database in the Hubitat it will now send a query 30 seconds or so after any change is commanded to make sure that it has the correct value. If you have added scheduled queries in your unit scripts please at least temporarily disable them so that you can test this and let me know if it makes that unnecessary or if there is still work to do.
• Amcrest Camera Control Plugin:
  • New units to capture the AI type events that the newer Amcrest Cameras support. If you can setup an “IVF” series of events for people or vehicals entering or leaving areas in the image then there will appear Units in XTension to let you know when those have happened. As usual you can rename them to be more useful once they have been created but since XTension can’t tell what events you have setup until they happen. ObjectDetection: (Vehicle | Human) (Enter | Leave) IVS-2(name of the rule in the list on the camera) and their addressing will be like:

(CROSSREGIONDETECTION | CROSSLINEDETECTION).(HUMAN | VEHICLE).(ENTER | LEAVE | LEFTTORIGHT | RIGHTTOLEFT).2(IVS Rule Number).

• New: Added a new verb “take snapshot” to the amcrest camera support. This will save a full res picture in the same directory yhou have chosen to save any recorded movies to. use like: tell xInterface “my frontdoor camera” to takeSnapshot()” or add a number to the parameters if the stream number is not 0 which is the default.
• Added a contextual menu item in the Interface List Window to “Reveal Active Plugin Folder in Finder” so that while developing plugins or if there are any questions you can more easily find the code that is actually running.