Latest Home assistant evolution show a very deep and efficient use of the tile cards to create easily a nice and streamlined dashboard.
Tile cards are to my opinion a very good improvement of default cards, allowing an easy and quick definition of dashboard, while having a nice and simple look. And most important for all users, a User Interface capability to modify the look and functionalities to keep it simple.
A few things seems to be missing to allow also advance users to fully migrate their dashboards to this default look:
Templating capabilities for Name, State, Icon, Color and badge in the Tile card or in an advanced Tile card: It is not possible to for example change the icon or icon color easily. You have either to go through card_mod or switch to mushroom template cards (both being awesome, but are not fully home assistant integrated). In the same manner, if you want to display a specific information, the only way to display Jinja2 template for the time being is the markdown card wich is not as nice as tile cards when placed together.
Capability to customize feature in the Tile card or in an advanced Tile card to create specific user controls buttons, slider, etcâŚ
My dream would be a fully advanced Tile card like this one (here a stack-in between a mushroom template card and a row of mushroom chip acting like feature buttons):
With the marvelous latest Grace project presentation, this would allow to build beautiful customized dashboard very easily !
Appart from templating, some capabilities are for my opinion missing from the current âbasicâ Tile card. Tile being a kind of Core integration of Mushroom from @piitaya it makes sense to compare their functionality. And some were not transposed from Mushroom to Tile and in some cases I personally think it deserve to think about it again:
Remove all but icon:
To be able to remove both the name (currently not possible) and the state (currently possible) and thus keep only the icon in the center of the rounded square of the Tile.
This is feasible in mushroom card, but not in Tiles.
This could be an easy way to create quick and nice buttons related to an entity:
with basic Tiles with the default icon and color behavior of the current Tile
with the here proposed advanced Tile with a full control of the icon and color through templating.
Propose an horizontal layout:
Although I am more a user of the default layout, the horizontal layout of the mushroom card was not transposed into the Tile card, whereas it could have offered some very space efficient configurations.
Features when Off
Best example is the light card where the temperature color is orange when the light is off. Not speaking about collapsible control like the mushroom, at least to have light grey when off would be more user friendly. thus a default feature state when entities are off could be defined for the one that make sense (light being the best example).
Illustration of compared view of Mushroom and Tiles capabilities for a single light (dimmable and temperature adjustable):
A backup proposition: making use of the new section could also be made with the two following features:
a customisable Tile card with templating option like the mushroom template cards as described above, or at least a markdown card compatible with the Tile look.
Modified Tiles allowing to hide all text acting as âTile buttonsâ, instead of the customisable feature
This could allow us to make small âsectionsâ with the main information on tile cards, and the main controls on âTile buttonsâ while remaining relatively space efficient.
The âdream Tile Cardâ shown above could be almost done using the new sections, one tile card and four Tile button. Using 2x4 grid space using or not the section title line, but sadly with less âspace efficiencyââŚ
