In the course of software development over time, some features are confirmed as critical over the years, and sometimes the opposite happens. Certain features simply never pan out into their original purpose, or no longer apply due to changes in user needs. There are a couple of features I’m thinking we can remove in the Fall release, but I’m posting this here now in case anyone wants to make a case for them surviving.
IR Learning: The UI for this is the oldest UI in the product. The whole area needs a lot of work to bring it up to par. Meanwhile, it is not clear anybody ever uses this feature. We have a great IR Library built-in which satisfies 99.99% of all IR code needs. For those incredibly rare cases that still need learning, there are several tools out there such as iHelp for Windows, iOS, and macOS from Global Caché that learn codes from iTach devices in GC format that can be pasted into Roomie’s Custom Devices editor. It seems better to me to let IR Learning be the province of tools designed specifically for that, just as we long ago returned iTach firmware updates to their tools.
Volumes Homebar Item: We have a multiroom linked activity feature coming in the next major release. This finally makes sense of volumes across multiple rooms taking into account which activities are related and active. Meanwhile, the Volumes Homebar item was sort of the nascent beginning of that idea, and now is simply slow, or not useful for common tasks. This Homebar item would be removed. Possibly with a complete re-design it could return in the future, but I’m just not sure there is a need for it. It was most useful for things like large Sonos group deployments. Dynamic group updates from the UI level for Sonos could be more difficult without it if anyone is doing that. Of course, such group updates are likely better handled by pre-designating all the group changes via command lists rather than tapping individual speakers into the group from the UI.
Last call on the above two features!