In this picture, these are 160px (medium) 1x1 tiles. The screen on my Kindle Fire 10 HD is exactly 7 tiles wide with equal spacing on the left and right sides.
This morning, I got the idea that I might be able to place half high tiles in that space along the bottom. I switched to a default 80px (tiny) tile using the configuration page. I then switched all my previous 1x1s to 2x2s and did the same doubling for the previous 1x2 and 1x3.
But the new tiles are smaller. There is now an unsightly gap down the right edge of the screen. I could zoom in Fully, but then its easy to accidentally pan the screen side to side or up and down when trying to interact with the tablet. In that first picture, the screen wasn’t pan-able at all and that was perfect.
Am I missing something? Shouldn’t a 160px 1x1 be exactly the same size as an 80px 2x2?
Spencer-
Thanks for posting and for including the links to the images.
A 160px 1x1 tile and a 80px 2x2 are approximately the same, but not exactly. I tried to reproduce this and what I found is that on a Fire HD 10 the 160px tiles allow 7 tiles in width, but the 80px tiles allow 15 tiles in width. So that space on the right side is effectively one 80px tile width.
There are a few options for achieving what you are looking for:
Use a custom tile size to fit the exact number of tiles you want (eg. 85px)
Fill the right hand side with small tiles
Make one tile on each row 1 size larger (eg. a 2x2 becomes a 2x3)
What happens is the system automatically tries to scale the tiles to fill as much space as possible. It takes into account the available width and the target size of tile you have specified and determines how many tiles it can fit. It then scales the tiles within a small range to make the tiles fill the width of the screen.
Also note that a 2x2 tile is the size of 2 tiles plus the gap between them.
Thank you for the fast, detailed, and thorough reply. I didn’t even notice the custom tile size option, that’ll be a perfect and quick workaround until I decide to actually use the tiny tiles.
Can I make an unrelated comment here? The dot that you drag to dim lights is very small. Maybe my wife and I are particularly uncoordinated or fat-fingered (or we’re just not that experienced with working with wall mounted touch screens), but it always takes us at least a couple of tries to touch it just perfectly to drag it. A bigger touch area would be great.
BTW, I was planning on paying for ActionTiles until I stumbled upon Sharptools. After doing a whole bunch of reading on both, Sharptools seems to be the better option, so I didn’t even bother trying ActionTiles. I’ve seen you mention a potential premium tier that may come in the future and I’m definitely waiting for a chance to either donate or pay for more features. I’ve read through most of the forum topics and the progress that has been made on Sharptools in a very short period of time is incredible.
Edit: Apparently someone flagged this as spam. I got a message saying that I had to wait ten minutes and then edit it to make less spammy. Other than the fact that I accidentally referred to “Sharptools” as “Smarttools”, I don’t personally see anything wrong with my post. I’ve now fixed these three typos. The post is not promotional in any way, shape, or form.
The forum has some heuristics for detecting spam and sometimes gets it wrong. From what I can tell, it looks like it noticed that there were several posts in a row linking to an external domain from a new user, so it blocked the posts.
I manually approved the posts and bumped your ‘level’ in the forum so you can paste photos directly into the post if you want. Apologies for the inconvenience!
I don’t know if you saw my comments about the brightness slider in post #3, but I wanted to point to it here in case you didn’t. I don’t mean to hound you about it, I just think that it would be a good change. I’ll be done with that point now.
I am having a new problem. In this picture (which was taken before I started messing with things this morning), you can see that the green “Laundry Dryer” tile is showing a wattage reading.
After playing with the sizes of everything and renaming that tile to “Dryer”, it has swtiched to just showing a lightbulb. I don’t know what happened to my wattage reading and i can’t figure out how to get it back. The Dryer sensor is an Aeotec Home Energy Meter.
Within Smartthings, Sharptools is granted access to it as a “sensor”. I checked all of the possible device types in the Sharptools smartapp and “sensor” is the only one that the dryer shows up under.
This was working fine for a week, I don’t understand what changed. I revoked Sharptools access to it, deleted the tile, then readded the authorization and the tile with no change.
Glad to hear that you are enjoying SharpTools! We have plans for even more features and our roadmap is heavily driven by user feedback, so we appreciate you being part of the community!
We have plans to update the underlying library that supports the dimmer control… I’m not sure if it improves the touch area, but I’ll take a look and see what we can do.
Hm. That is odd. SharpTools should get full access to all the underlying capabilities no matter which category its authorized under… is it possible that the Layout for the tile got switched somehow during the editing? The lightbulb is the default layout for generic Things whereas the wattage would be shown if the Layout was changed to Hero Attribute.
You can change a tile’s layout by:
Open your desired dashboard
Tap the ... in the bottom right of the screen and choose Edit
Tap the ... in the top-right corner of the tile and select Change Layout
Select Hero Attribute from the list
Tap the ... in the top-right corner of the tile and select Edit
Change your desired selections for displayed attribute, units, etc.
Ahh, thank you, that did it. I’m pretty sure that I had to do that a week ago when I set it up the first time, but for some reason I couldn’t figure out how to do it again. Sorry for taking your time making you type all that up.
