Today’s SharpTools.io update includes new Music, Weather, and Spacer tiles as well as an update to the Media Tile! I’m trying something new this time with the inclusion of a YouTube video describing some of the new features - let me know if this is helpful or if you prefer the standard text-and-image update posts!
New Features:
Music Playback
The new Music Playback tiles let you control the playback of audio devices in your home (and some video devices!). In the screenshot below, we are controlling our Office Sonos device - clicking play lets us quickly start playing some tunes and the currently playing track is displayed.
The Details link in the bottom left brings up some additional playback controls, additional player data, and volume controls.
Weather
The new Weather tiles are available for SmartWeather compatible devices. If you don’t already have a SmartWeather device in your SmartThings installation, you can add it from the SmartThings IDE or try out the community Weather Station 2.0 device.
Check out the Weather Help Article for details on a solution using a community developed weather tile:
WARNING: The WeatherStation 2.0 will likely stop working in February 2019. It is recommended to use the SmartThings provided WeatherStation Tile instead.
The weather tiles display easy to read forecast icons, temperature, and other weather related data like sunrise, sunset, humidity, percent precipitation, and wind speed.
Spacer
Have you ever wanted to position your tiles in a really specific layout? The new Spacer tiles provide more flexibility for positioning your real tiles by allowing you to fill in gaps with blank spacer tiles. The spacer tiles are visible during editing, but disappear leaving an empty gap where you’ve laid them out.
Note that the tile layout engine still defaults to a left-to-right, top-to-bottom layout, so sometimes it’s helpful to either adjust your browser to the target device’s width or edit from a computer while watching the target device. Each time you press the orange save icon in the editor, the changes are pushed out to your devices.
Media Tile Updates
Media Tiles now have two new options for better laying out your media - Media Scaling and Media Position. The scaling option lets you choose between ‘Fill’, ‘Contain’, and ‘Cover’ which will either ‘stretch’, ‘fit’, or ‘trim’ the media item into the tile respectively. The Media Position option is especially helpful with ‘cover’ scaling option as it lets you vertically align the image to choose which part of the image is trimmed off.
The YouTube video at the top of this post shows how each of these options work. Alternatively, the following post has some screenshots showing each option:
