Lovelace is great - while it still does have plenty shortcomings as pointed out in other WTH, it has a good flexibility and I like it - but for desktop use only.
I do however use Home Assistant on different devices, and there lovelace just sucks.
One use case is my wall panel. I have set up a nice picture-elements card with a 3d model of my home, with toggles per room for my lights and vacuum, and additional sensor data like temperature. The thing is, editing is a nightmare. A big one. My picture-element card’s config has unbelievable 560 lines. And configuring it, because I have some side panels, is not possible with a live preview, because it’s too small and looks like this: .
I need an external editor, after every change copy it over, save it so I get a preview. Adjusting positions have to be done with numbers and blindly. That’s not nice. It is still missing a lot of features, like popups and dynamic stuff. Some can be added with additional custom cards. But It just seems like it would need a own frontend for a use with a wal panel.
The other use case is my phone. It needs more compact, interactive, scrollable, collapsible and dynamic cards, optimised for touch. Having a row of entities or scenes is nice. Not seeing any names of these suck. A graph takes half the screen and still is only static. A list of toggles uses the whole screen.
The android “device control” is very basic, still I use it everytime over the HA app to control my lights.
I know it would be great to have one frontend to serve all needs, and having multiple adds a lot of work and maintenance. But I honestly don’t see another way around it. There are some 3rd party solutions, but it feels such things need to be at core level.
A graphic frontend with a great editor and a compact frontend designed for mobile phones would be a game changer. Making it possible to combine them would be the icing on the cake.
I had percentage values in the beginning. I can’t remember the reason I had to use absolute values. It was maybe because I use the card also my desktop dashboard but with a different size and maintaining it twice was too much hassle.
Still, the preview is so small, can’t really use that to work with. The code editor also isn’t made for 560 lines. And it all feels very hacky. A frontend designed for such things would not only makes things a lot easier, it would also open a lot of new possibilities.
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