Calendar and News Feed Tiles

josh · March 7, 2019, 6:06pm

It’s time for another exciting SharpTools.io platform release! This release includes brand new Calendar tiles and News Feed tiles.

Calendar tiles let you view your upcoming agenda from any iCal compatible calendar services (Google, Apple, Office 365) or from public calendar feeds like major holidays or events.

News Feed tiles enable you to keep up with things that are happening on your favorite blogs, news sites, or discussion forums by displaying content from their RSS feeds.

Calendars

The new Calendar feature enables you to view agenda items from your iCal compatible calendar in your SharpTools.io dashboards. Most modern calendar services like Google Calendar, Apple iCloud, and Office 365 provide iCal compatible URLs and we’ve updated our help articles with tips on how to connect each of these.

Additional calendar sources include websites like Facebook which provide upcoming events and friend birthdays as an iCal compliant source. And there are several public resources which share iCal files of public events, holidays, and more.

After adding your calendar to your SharpTools.io account from the Manage Resources page, you can add the calendar as a tile to your dashboard.

Premium users have access to add multiple calendars which will refresh at a faster interval compared to the Free tier (eg. 30 minutes vs 6 hours) and can combine multiple calendars together into a single tile by editing an existing calendar tile:

The calendar tile comes with a variety of settings so you can customize the agenda to look the way you want it to:

Orientation: Vertical or Horizontal
- Changes the display of the tile between a vertical list of dates or horizontal list of dates
Show End Time
- Shows the start time for the agenda event
Show Start Time
- Shows the end time for the agenda event (if available)
Time Position: Below Summary or Left of Summary
- Changes the display of the time to either be in a column to the left of the summary or a line below the summary
Enable Agenda Hyperlinks
- Turns the agenda item into a clickable link if the agenda item includes a URL

There’s also a convenient basic ‘Month’ calendar which shows the current month with the current date highlighted (optional):

News Feeds

The News Feeds feature enables you to keep up with your favorite blogs, news sites, or other sites that provide a valid RSS feed.

After adding your News Feed to your SharpTools.io account from the Manage Resources page, you can add the news feed as a tile to your dashboard.

Premium users have access to adding multiple RSS feeds which will refresh at a faster interval compared to the Free tier (eg. 30 minutes vs 2 hours).

The News Feed tile comes with a variety of settings so you can customize the feed to look the way you want it to:

Truncate Article Titles
- Prevents long article titles from wrapping to the next line
Show Article Summary
- Show the article summary as provided by the feed
Show Article Date
- Show the article date as provided by the feed
Hyperlink to Article
- Enable the ability to tap the article to view the original article
Link Action
- Customize how the Article Hyperlink is handled. Note that some feeds will block being embedded in other websites, so if the ‘Open in Modal’ option doesn’t work, try the Open in New Window option.

Manage Resources

Along with the addition of the new Calendar and News Feed resources, we’ve consolidated the management of resources into a single Manage Resources screen which can be found in the second tab of your User Page.

If you had grown accustom to managing your Media and Hyperlinks from the user menu in the top-right corner of the page, the Manage Resources link is now where you can find these features.

Other Enhancements

More control over hyperlinks
- Hyperlinks in Media Tiles and RSS Feeds now support changing the hyperlink action (modal, same window, new window)
Hyperlink Modal Enhancements
- Modal now shows a loading indicator and warning if the linked page times out or doesn’t support being embedded
Improved dynamic subscriptions
- Especially for a group of Hubitat users who were having issues with some subscriptions not getting setup

Dan_Fox · March 9, 2019, 2:30am

Josh, just tried this with my Google calendar, but kept getting an error:

Error validating the calendar. Try again or try a different iCal compatible URL.

josh · March 9, 2019, 2:51am

Thanks for the report, Dan. @James found that he had an event added to his calendar today which triggered an error for him as well. I’ll follow up with him and let you know what we find.

josh · March 9, 2019, 6:56am

@Dan_Fox can you give it a shot again? I just pushed an update which I believe should solve the issue.

Dan_Fox · March 9, 2019, 1:32pm

Still getting the same error.

josh · March 9, 2019, 3:33pm

@Dan_Fox can you give it one more try? Added one more tweak. If that doesn’t solve it, then I may need you to PM me your calendar so I can see what’s going on.

Dan_Fox · March 9, 2019, 5:15pm

Working now. (need 20 characters)

Tommy · March 9, 2019, 6:24pm

Calendar is awesome @josh . Added to my phone dashboard! Keep it up

RaY_Tavan_Ho · March 14, 2019, 11:22pm

Hi @josh,The Calendar is awesome by the way. Is it possible to add more than 4 days of events in google calendar?

josh · March 14, 2019, 11:42pm

Glad you are enjoying the new tiles! The Calendar tile currently filters to the next 7 days. How many days were you hoping to display?

RaY_Tavan_Ho · March 15, 2019, 4:46pm

I see the problem. It’s displaying only the days with events. That was why I see only 4 days. Sharptools skipping the 3 days in the middle with no event.
Possible I could request to have number of events instead the of days? Maybe 10 to 15 events?

Daryl_Figge · March 16, 2019, 1:34am

I’m getting the same trying to add my google calendar

josh · March 16, 2019, 2:08am

Thanks for posting - I’d start by double checking that the right URL is being used. For Google Calendar, you’ll want to make sure you’re using the URL from the section that says Secret address in iCal format. You’ll get an error message if the provided URL isn’t in iCal format or the system can’t access/parse it.

You can find detailed steps for setting up Google Calendar in the following article (and the help article is also accessible from the ‘Help’ button on the Calendar creation screen if you need it for future reference):

Keith_Croshaw · March 18, 2019, 2:39pm

So iCloud spits out:

webcal://p51-calendars.icloud.com/published/2/<NUMBERSANDLETTERS>

I tried https:// instead of webcal://
It didn’t like it.

Any tips?
Thanks!

Keith_Croshaw · March 19, 2019, 12:37am

Thanks for the quick fix @josh
Works great!
Really need a tablet on a wall.

Automated_House · March 27, 2019, 9:12pm

oooo, this looks fun. May have to knock the dust off a tablet I had started playing with many months ago.

Automated_House · March 27, 2019, 9:25pm

Will the https://status.smartthings.com/ RSS feed work with this?

josh · March 27, 2019, 9:42pm

Their ‘snippets’ are a bit long, but yes.

The URL I used for testing was:
https://status.smartthings.com/history.rss

GrooveENERGY_ca · August 29, 2019, 8:23pm

Greetings,

How does one create a calendar tile with a link from the secret address Google calendar, if the end of the URL ends with .ICS? Sharptools gives an error validating the calendar.

i.e.
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/-----------------/basic.ics

Thanks

josh · August 29, 2019, 8:34pm

Hm… it sounds like you’re using the right URL. It’s this one, right?