Feature Requests from a new A+ Owner

[Ehryk]

Touchscreen UI:
 - Cannot lock screen with a pin
 - root password is visible to anyone who walks past it, could you make it hidden and/or screen pin locked?
 - Hold 'DEL' for >1s should clear text boxes
 - Hold 'CAP' for >1s should be caps lock
 - Port Forwarding feature please?
 - Terminal tile?
 - DDNS tile?
 - Entering Almond account credentials right into router for true standalone setup process would be nice

Web UI:
 - Could you add a nice A+ favicon.ico for the bookmark, tabs, etc.?
 - Would it be possible to enable the entering of machine/device/host names in Port Forwarding (to make it forward to a specific machine not IP address)? This could be a really unique feature to the A+ and make it really easy for less experience folks to forward ports http://serverfault.com/questions/255055/dynamic-port-forwarding-based-on-hostname-or-originating-ip
 - Button sizes are varied on the same page (FSTAB -> bottom of page) and the text is misaligned with the icons (Processes -> text is ~3px lower) in Chrome 36.0

SSH/Console UI:
Could we get a text editor in here? I prefer 'nano'
opkg update / opkg install working

That's it for now - I'm super excited now that I have it!

[LGNilsson]

We're working on fixing most if not all of the issues you've brought up and we're about to release a new firmware today that will address at least some of the things you brought up. I can't promise when it'll all be done, but rest assured that we'll keep working on adding features and fixing things on the Almond+ for the remainder of its product life.

[summat]

Referring to things by name has been done in pfSense since day one.

It's a brilliant way to simplify both rule creation and reading.

pfSense calls these 'aliases' and they can be used in place of hostnames (which are re-resolved every few hours to keep them updated), IPs, CIDR ranges, ports, groups of ports, or even as a way to import a list of any of the supported types from a plain text file at a URL for filtering purposes, which again, is updated on a schedule to stay current.

For instance I have an alias to allow a specific set of external addresses to ICMP ping my home connection for monitoring purposes, on most routers this would require a rule for each IP, with aliases it's a single rule.

Very useful, and a feature I will certainly miss when I leave pfSense for Almond+ once the firmware is feature-complete, and of course when the UK units have actually shipped out. Hopefully it can be added!

[byteless]

We're working on fixing most if not all of the issues you've brought up and we're about to release a new firmware today that will address at least some of the things you brought up. I can't promise when it'll all be done, but rest assured that we'll keep working on adding features and fixing things on the Almond+ for the remainder of its product life.

Once we have the new firmware apply to the router, I guess we need to factory reset, or the new firmware would do the factory reset.

If we have the configuration saved, would importing the configuration bring back all the settings + sensors?

is there a way to save the sensors (if not settings) somehow. It will be very painful to delete all the sensors and re-enroll on every firmware upgrade.

please advise.

[LGNilsson]

Sensors and the cloud connectivity is not affected by firmware upgrades.
In general you can also keep the settings when you do a firmware upgrade, but yes, you'll be able to restore the settings file if all else fail.

[Ehryk]

So - not to be a n00b, but is the firmware / development on github / available somewhere for us to help out? It's great that these are planned / in the works!

If not, will devs be able to write custom 'tiles' for the Touch UI? Perhaps load them in through SSH or some sort of store-like thing? This kind of stuff sure would take a load off your development team!

[LGNilsson]

We're going to release the open source parts shortly.

With the SDK it's possible to create new tiles/apps for the LCD UI, but we promised an exclusive to the developer level backers for six months and after that it'll be possible to request access to the SDK.
As for adding third party apps, this is still something we're working on and it'll be some time before we have a simple solution in place for this.