A notification or ticker bar at the top or bottom of the dashboard would be cool for displaying important notifications that pop up from time to time. For example, it could be a red horizontal bar that pops down from the top of the dashboard when there is something to display, like a tornado warning, or heavy traffic on your commute. Notifications done that way would catch your eye when they occur, but not take up screen real estate otherwise. I don’t know which would be better, to push the existing content down and squish the display vertically to make room for the notification bar, or to layer the notification bar on top. Probably the latter. Or, if layering isn’t possible, even just have an option to define a static thin horizontal bar space at the top and/or bottom of your dashboard, which would hide (with nothing there) when nothing to show.
I suspect implementation could be difficult, but just an idea.
I’ve been personally interested in the idea of being able to send a ‘notification’ to a device that’s displaying a dashboard (without requiring a separate app like Pushbullet or Pushover). I had not considered the use case of a small, but persistent notification though.
We’ve noted the request and will leave the topic open to gather further community interest and feedback.
Yeah, for my wall mounted dashboard I would think a more persistent notification would be useful. It’s (going to be) right beside the door to the garage so I would see the notification at whatever time I end up leaving in the morning. Since the departure time varies within a window of maybe 5-10 minutes, the persistence of the notification would ensure it is seen within that window.
I definitely would love to see the ability to push a message to all dashboards - individual rooms would be great too, but a simple popup would be a nice feature.
I’ve gone ahead and converted this topic into a Feature Request and have moved a few of the comments into their own thread as they seemed to be asking for a slightly different feature.
Be sure to scroll up to the top and cast your vote on the feature request.
Looks like this feature has gotten some momentum with 7 votes. Coming along. In the meantime, the new styling and transparent tile option makes it viable to have a designated space for displaying a notification if and only if one exists. So, could have a transparent variable tile at the top or bottom of the screen. Downside is that it’s wasted space if there’s no notification. But, still workable while this gains votes. To get this to work well, though, I would want the tile to extend across the whole width of the screen. For some reason, I can only specify a horizontal dimension of 10x - won’t go any higher than that.
Could Sharptools allow a horizontal dimension of more than 10x (in particular, the full width of the screen)? Or is there some technical reason why 10x is the limit?
Can you help me better understand what you are looking to accomplish? Maybe a screenshot of what you’ve mocked up so far? As a workaround, could you use spacers on either side of the notification rather than full width?
It’s not really a technical limitation for the 10x sizing so much as a UX concern. The default dashboard sizes max out at 8x tiles wide and phones/tablets are using 2-6x, so going bigger than 10x hasn’t been requested frequently.
In theory, the Custom Tiles that are in beta could also be used to display notification ‘toasts’. We don’t currently offer an option for persisting the toast messages, but I would be open to the idea.
Perhaps the size is becoming an issue for me because I’m using a large screen (15.6" for my dashboard). I’ve found that the best tile size for that display is 20 tiles wide (with the scalable sizing option selected). So I would need 20x wide option.
However, I might actually need to go wider in order to have the height of the tiles be what I need for displaying the notification. That, or somehow top justify the text…Looks like I might have to use a custom tile for that at the moment, since I a variable tile does not have the option to top justify the text
(FYI this dashboard is still a work in progress but I do now have the background image changing to reflect the weather. Cool! And the presence tiles on the bottom left are custom tiles. Double cool!)
This is something I have been wanting to do for some time now. I used to run all of my dashboards on Allonis.
One of them was the ability to create an overlay that loaded with the underlying dashboard but was hidden until a flag was set. This allowed me to have any part of the screen change at will based on alerts, etc. For example I placed a row of buttons (tiles) across the bottom of the screen and could change them dynamically based on time of day, external events, etc. I could provide more details and perhaps dig up some screen shots possibly.
FYI - I have the same issue as @Justin_Leonard - I use large screens and set my columns at 25 so have to get creative with the label tile by sewing a couple together to get past the 10 width limit.
but I do now have the background image changing to reflect the weather. Cool! And the presence tiles on the bottom left are custom tiles. Double cool!)