Would you be happy if Apple or Microsoft followed that strategy?
If the HA team is truly in a corner with a feature and they explained that, I’m sure people would understand.
I agree that sometimes a breaking change cannot be avoided, but in those cases provide a migration sttagegy and/or a deprecation timeline.
The kind of projects you describe won’t survive for long anyway, I’d think. Features and innovation is important, but it doesn’t need to preclude maintenance. HA is in a healthy state. Those risks aren’t necessary.
As a user of 5yrs I have gone through this at least twice. Always because of breaking changes that weren’t properly documented.
The first being the classic bluetooth tracker where there was zilch acknowledgment of the issue and second with the stock thermostat card. Another UI change that broke things.
In the latter case it took nearly 3 months for the community to come up with card-mod styles to replicate what was never broken in the first place!
It appears now that, whilst not acknowledged, it has been learnt that there should be a way back although this has had to be “discovered” by the users.
I refer to @madelena here.
“Before then, the problem was somewhat resolved with the discovery of custom:hui-state-badge-element”
So, whilst painful, it appears lessons are being learnt I hope
Frankly, I’d prefer HA not use Apple or Micro$oft as a role model.
I’m old enough to remember when people used to look forward to an update from M$. This was a time (believe it or not) when M$ actually conducted user testing. They watched how users interacted with their products, and worked hard to make those users’ day-to-day jobs easier. The changes were incremental; shave a few moments, or one click, off a process that the user repeats a thousand times a day, and you’ve made a big improvement.
Now we all dread their updates. There are no usability improvements. Everything is “dumbed down” so that it looks clean and fashionable to the designers and reviewers - people who never actually use the product. Everything is shuffled around, names are changed and advanced features are hidden or made more complex to access. Some features are dropped in the name of simplicity for the beginner. Experienced users are worse off.
The constructive request has been made multiple times in this thread already: provide a way to hide the icon. Do that one simple thing and most of these complaints will go away.
UX isn’t only about what is mathematically correct. A lot of it is how things are perceived.
That old badges example above feels a lot better in terms of layout — the way it’s packed.
But there are many issues with that too, like the font sizes that differ and the off-centre vertical positioning of the inner text (which also comes too close, horizontally, to the edges at times). The font size is of course a function of length due to the limited space, which is why some of that happens.
The new badges handle fonts better, due to their flexibility, but the greyed font for the label is not sufficiently prominent, when arguably it should be. Here the old badges win: You know immediately what you’re looking at (power, pump, temp, salt, whatever).
I would also argue the separation of the unit of the old badges are better — the principle, not necessarily the aesthetics of it.
The mandatory addition of the badge icon takes up space that is unnecessary in many/most cases. Look at the examples above, and see if the ladder icon increases the understanding-at-a-glance of the Pool value.
The icon wasn’t in badges previously. Now it is required. It’s really not a new feature request to be able to turn the darn things off!
It would be helpful if moderators showed some level of empathy that this is not an unreasonable perspective.
Dude. Please stop with the personal attacks. I don’t care about badges. I don’t use them. Al I care about is that these forums don’t devolve into a ranting shitfest full of inaccuracies.
Keep your comments accurate and constructive and all will be well.
