Dashboard chapter 2: Let’s redesign the cards together!

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So you support breaking everyone else home assistant layout on some random tuesday with no notice?

Let me make an analogy, how would you feel if I broke into your house and changed the default language on all of your devices to something you couldn’t read like sanskrit, how exactly would that be helping you?

Intentionally breaking other peoples stuff because you want them to upgrade, is the thing that I really hate about home assistant. The developers here have a flagrant disregard for other peoples setups and have no guilt or remorse when they break other people’s stuff.

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I’m trying to understand your reaction and response, I’m curious as to how long you’ve been using Home Assistant and just how integrated the system is with your home that these changes seem so drastic and almost offensive to you.

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It’s Wednesday, but anyway… Don’t you think, your statement is a little self drawn? What makes you think, that your experience will be the same for everybody else?

However, no one is breaking things out of enjoyment. But things need to be fixed sometimes. In most cases this can be done without a lot of interference, but sometimes it’s just unavoidable to do things, that need to be addressed by the user.

I’m quite sure, that for you this is a big thing, and it is more than understandable, that you’re pissed! But please keep in mind, others here might not have the same experience as you, and will feel offended by your words. Not talking about the developers, that do a great job (even if right now you don’t think so) in keeping all our homes automated and bring some luxury to our daily lifes! :slight_smile:

BUT, as I said, as this seems to be a huge problem for you, why not concentrate first on what could be done, to make it better for you, or in the best outcome, solve your problem right away?

So, let us know, where your problems are (HA related) and I’m quite sure, some of the nice folks here will be able to help you! :slight_smile:

And then, this would be your lucky day, because you would have updated to the most modern techniques, and your home would still be the best automated home on earth. :+1:

And if I may give some sort of recommendation: downgrade for now to the last version that works for you, and see, how the problems can get solved for the new (.8) version! Would that help? :slight_smile:

C’mon, we all know how hard it is, when an update breaks something, but aren’t we all here because we love home automation? So, give us some hints, and together we’ll get this solved!

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These badges won’t work for me.

I mainly use badges as opposed to cards when I need information density. The old style could fit a surprising amount of info and functionality into a small space. These new ones… not so much.

I’d be excited about this if either:

  • The old style remained by default.
  • These pills were added as a new card rather than replacing the existing badge.
  • These pills had the same (or higher) information density than the old badge.
  • There was a different way to keep old-style badges (such as moving the old-style badges to a custom UI element in a separate repo) that required sublinear time in the # of existing badges.
    • This is almost the case. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any simple way to do mass find-replace in UI config, unlike YAML config.

Unfortunately, none of these appear to be the case…

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While in general I agree that any changes that break old behaviour need to be carefully considered, it’s not reasonable to demand that nothing ever changes. And in this particular case, it’s only interface, it’s not going to break some important house functionality (like many previous updates did for some people).

Also, this is not happening without warning. First of all, it was announced in advance, as we were commenting here before the update appeared. Secondly, nobody is updating your insurance secretly to break your home. You have to update yourself, you don’t have to do it right away, you can wait as much as you want, until you are ready to deal with the changes.

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in fact this exactly the current state, you can still use the now legacy badges as custom (for the time being)

see 2024.8: Beautiful badges! - #10 by nickrout

simply use:

custom:hui-state-badge-element
entity: your.entity

I would have done it differently as I feel the pain of ‘progress’ breaking something that works for a lot of users… but, somehow the dev team wont be persuaded to do it differently (some of us tried to bring forward these arguments). So there is no other way than adapt.

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There are many many many many counterexamples to this.

If HA was completely isolated, you would be correct. Unfortunately it interfaces with many external agents we have no control over, and so old versions bitrot.

That being said I personally do tend to delay updates. However, it’s not as simple as “not updating never breaks anything so you shouldn’t be annoyed about updates because you can just delay as long as you want” (apologies for the triple negative). Not updating itself breaks things over time.

You missed the key part: “that required sublinear time in the # of existing badges.”.

What you describe is something that needs to be manually done for each and every existing badge you wish to keep in the prior style.

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Making the top section for badges horizontally scrollable would be very useful on mobile devices.

RPReplay_Final1723181682-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter

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I was responding to this point:

Of course things may break, especially if you have devices or services relying on third parties. But it’s not Home Assistant that automatically updates your instance and breaks things suddenly “on some random tuesday”. It’s also not the lack of updating HA that breaks things. It’s other things randomly breaking and you may be lucky to have HA fix it.

I can’t be bothered to check all the examples you linked, but the first one is about an issue reported in December 2023 (and from the comment in there, likely much older) fixed now.

So it’s something that seemed to be broken for half a year. If this affected you, do you really think you would have to update your instance on the day the update came or you could wait a few more days until you have time to deal with the badges?

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sorry I missed your key part… but you’re welcome anyways

and yes, you might have to do some rewriting. seems a one-liner edit replace though

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is that screen vid of swiper card in action, or is it mockup?

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It’s the Apple Home app.

I quite like how it group things too in there. If you tap on lights e.g. it will filter the entities below (cut off in my gif). Those badges aren’t actually explicitly defined.

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arghh, of course !
I now see that… I dont really use it, as having 3 systems doing the same and having to configure them all is a bit much, but yes, those designs are very very nice, and so eloquent.

These badges seem very familiar too :wink:

checking the difference between HA an Apple here I do love the way Apple handles the Light sliders.

When off there is the bulb-off icon on the slider, which makes it clearer then the HA slider. I also love the fact we can slide to off, and not just to the 1% (who needs that minimum anyways.?) and require the off button we see I HA at all times, even when off…

20240809_073757000_iOS
20240809_073757000_iOS1170×2532 144 KB

might be a nice redesign aspect for HA

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Same, but in cases where I need to use an app, the Home app is by far the fastest and most convenient. I don’t have dashboards around the home though.

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For me it is somehow a pity why every system is (or whyever has to) currently looking more or less exactly the same.

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I try and judge every idea on its own merit. If it happens to be duplicated because it’s good (or the best), I don’t mind. There’s always a danger by not being innovative. Others are playing catch-up, which is a different situation.

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The thing I hate most about this is that a lot of use are running out of windows because the UI Changes MS keeps doing and screwing things up and we all are supporting Open Source because of this.

we had the same issue when Microsoft changed the start menu and we hated it… now is happening in home assistant with the badges, it was changed because the new is modern not matter what… Nit happy with this :frowning:

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Was not against you or related to your scroll request.

It was only my overall doubt/feeling, why HA in general need to look exactly as 90% of other solutions.

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Late on here,
I’ve played with all sorts of home automation ideas from early 1992. Remember mosaic??
Anyway - after all those years and many “great new things” ideas, about 7 years ago I took a plunge with HA.
I don’t regret my decision. Sure some of the scripts, yaml, syntax etc just does my head in.
BUT - for a bit of software that responds to users - these guys rock.
You pick your forum topics and after a while you recognise the worthwhile contributors.
Time for another beer!!!

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We already do scrolling for the toolbar in data tables.

With that said, the implementation in Apple Home is unintuitive for a different reason. Theirs aren’t “badges” even though they look visually similar. They are actually filters for the list below.