If you read my Home Automation Kickoff post you'll remember my praise to SmartThings for embracing the community and extensibility of the SmartThings platform. The list of apps that SmartThings includes out of the box varies from time to time, and you'll notice that some of the SmartApps, including the "Vacation Lighting Director" were not actually written by SmartThings. Scroll down and tap on the "Lights & Switches" category, and you'll find a list of lighting related SmartApps. SmartApps are located right alongside "Routines" in the automation panel, and clicking "Add a SmartApp" will present you with a list of available/installed SmartApps.
This is the modern alternative to running around the house setting individual light timers before you hit the road for your trip. To illustrate the power of the out of the box SmartApps, let's look at the Vacation Lighting Director SmartApp, which automatically makes your home appear occupied when you're away. SmartApps are a way to run complex logic, calculations, or even call external services as part of the automation. You can think of a SmartApp almost as a Routine on steroids. I'll talk more about the latter options when we get to creating our own SmartApp in a future post. In addition to that, you can self-publish your own SmartApps directly within SmartThings Graph, or publish SmartApps to GitHub for yourself or others to use. SmartThings provides a number of SmartApps and SmartApp categories right out of the box, so you can just pick an existing one and be up and running. SmartApps are written in Groovy, and can be found within the "Add a SmartApp" menu inside of SmartThings.
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