I am just throwing out a couple of ideas to see if there’s any interest.
I would like to see more control over the fonts, especially the adjustment of size. If you build a dashboard using the format “Tiny,” the labels take up most of the tile preventing you from seeing the detail.
Another suggestion would be to have for the dashboard tile display an attribute. Example here would be to have a rule that averages the temperatures of multiple thermostats or motion detectors and have it display on the dashboard tile. Once clicked, it can go to a detailed dashboard of all the measurements.
The main content for a tile dynamically resizes with the tile size to fit… for Tile Titles, if we dynamically resized them using the same logic, the titles would end up super tiny and unreadable, so we decided not to dynamically resize them. We also wanted to have some level of consistency with the tile titles across various tiles and didn’t want some titles really small and others massive.
To your point, I think that adding a Dashboard Setting for the Tile Title size would be a good approach that strikes the balance of both of the concerns I noted.
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I’m open to hearing community feedback on what options should be included. We’re always trying to strike a balance between providing enough customization options and not providing too many customization options.
A key part of our design philosophy is “simple, but powerful”… meaning that we want to expose nice customization features, but don’t want to expose so many options that the application becomes overwhelming and unapproachable to average users.
Sometimes that means we end up hiding advanced features behind ‘Advanced’ toggles, like we’ve done in the Dashboard Settings… or other times that means providing reasonable defaults and not exposing knobs/levers for each and every possible thing that can be tweaked.
I’m thinking that this type of deep level of customization (letter-spacing, kerning, etc) might be better served by allowing custom CSS or some other power-user type of approach.
We’ve been thinking about a concept of ‘variables’ that would allow the Rule Engine and Dashboards to interact with each other.
(We actually prototyped some early versions of the variable concept, but ended up shifting focus back to other highly requested community items)
The idea would be that you could set the values of variables in the Rule Engine and then use those variables in different places in the dashboard or in other rules. In your example, you might use a rule to average multiple sensors and store that value in a variable… then display that variable as the label in your dashboard tile.
I would love to have the ability to change not only the font, but also text color if possible. It would be nice to have a few fonts to choose from as well as bold and italic. It would also be nice to be able to change the size of any text. I know that in some instances you can change the text size, but some (like clock tiles) you can’t. It’s not the end of the world though, and I have so much to learn at this point that font size and color are pretty low priorities.
There have been several posts regarding giving the user some control of font size, color, etc. Even being able to choose white or black font color would be a great addition. It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible for me to read text using many of the light colored tiles. An example:
The font color should be chosen by state, just as icon and tile color are now so, for example, the user could select a dark font for a light-colored “OFF” tile, and a light font for a dark-colored “ON” tile.
Oh - and just one more thing - a transparent font color would be cool! I once mentioned being able to have a tile visible/invisible. Using a transparent font on a transparent tile would provide that capability.
ST n00b here - just subbed today and created my first basic dashboard. Actiontiles can do this, so I’m guessing SharpTools can too - I just haven’t found where. Here’s what I have: a nighttime monitor dashboard - iPad brightness is set at minimum, dashboard/inactive tile background is black, but all the text and icons are bright white.I’d like to soften the brightness to not light up the room so much - maybe change the color to grey. Am I missing the setting to do this? Thanks! Looking forward to building a few more dashboards for the rest of my screens…
Hi @L_Gallup, welcome to the community, and I hope you don’t mind me moving your topic to this existing thread for the font customization request. Text color customization is not currently supported, at least not in the direct way, but the text customization (or style system) is in our hit list. So the provided use case is very helpful and appreciated!
While you are exploring things in SharpTools.io you might have noticed that we have put a lot of efforts in keeping things “simply, but powerful”, and try to provide great customization options without making it overwhelming.
That being said, there is still a way to customize the text color if you use Fully Kiosk Browser on an Android/Fire tablet. See the post below that Josh has shared some tips to customize the text style through Fully’s Javascript injection feature.
Thanks for the quick and helpful response, and no, don’t mind the housekeeping. My apologies for not putting it in the right place to start. I def appreciate the simple but powerful paradigm. If you tried to be all things to all people you’d be Microsoft Office. I guess for now I’ll keep Actiontiles running on that particular device. SharpTools is much easier when I need to make changes, but I have a very specific need for that location. Good to know on Android as well. I don’t currently run any Android gear, but I’ve toyed with the idea.
Just an update that I’ve moved this topic into the Feature Requests category so users can vote on it and show their interest (feel free to scroll to the first post and cast your vote).
We’re actively working on a Theme / Style concept that should cover the core requests around size of the titles and colors of various tile elements (title, main content, footer).
The quality and quantity of features added to SharpTools in the past several months is impressive indeed. Features range from useful to astonishing! I still haven’t been able to familiarize myself with all of them.
No matter the technology under the hood, what the user sees is fonts and icons.
I believe effort to add flexibility in this area will result in cheers of appreciation from around the world, heard even in the penthouse suite at SharpTools Tower.
We’ve released a new Themes and Styles feature to beta. If you’re interested in this feature and not already part of the beta program, please send a PM to @support requesting access.
