So I do use dashboards, typically just to check on things and to make sure automations are running correctly. Or if something gone wrong for debugging. I do have a specific dashboard - a single phone screen worth of tiles - that has a subset of items that I may want to check on when away mostly. Or when my wife says she wants a different light on for the cats than usual when we are out for the evening. Don’t laugh. It happens.
I agree with the statement that if it was like wink, it would be more enticing for them to jump on, but I think that goes against how hubitat wants to market themselves.
The dashboard can be anything you want it to be. It takes some work and understanding. But that’s what hubitat is all about.
Wink was a mess. Add a few too many robots and you couldn’t find anything. Couldn’t rearrange things or hide things you didn’t care to see.
Sure I would like to be able to drag and drop my tiles around, but at least there is a way to move them where you want.
I get it that some people don’t use dashboards at all. My wife doesn’t. I tried to share the link with her to one of my dashboards and she said “I’ll never use it. That’s what alexa is for”
But for those not able to grasp that some people would like a little bit of an easier experience, well i think you could at least be a little sympathetic. There I said that as nice as I can.
I seem like I’m in the minority here, I’m not so much for automation. I’m more about accessibility. I did the timed light with motion sensors and hated it. I use h.e and HomeKit to manually, unmanually turn devices on and off. I have very few automations. Actually none, all my “automations” are notifications. “Notify me if x bedroom is x degrees” then I like to open my room in homekit and do whatever. I used to do the “x degrees, turn on fan” and had many disasters. (My fault) but still.
Agree 100% and I should have said earlier I do agree with the OP, but there are a lot of great people that spend time here helping others in all facets of HE. If you want to improve something about your HE setup and need help, post it most likely someone/s will help as best they can.
the smartly team has done a lot to make it 'easier' on the dashboard side. One day we also hope HE will have the vast resources needed to have even better UI/UX built in. If anyone needs help on the dashboard side feel free to tag me and I'll happily help as much as I can.
I don't think the HE would ever be able to update their dashboard to be good enough to please everybody. As hard as they may try, its not going to please everybody and there will always be outspoken people that have issues with it. Everybody is different and has different needs/wants.
What I do like about HE though is that we have options because of its open integrations. We can use the built in dashboards, or we could design our own (if technical enough) or integrate and it use it with HomeKit or Google Home as dashboards/apps. We even have the choice of using Sharptools or other 3rd party dashboards.
In the end we have choices with the dashboards and to me that is a good thing.
MAN!!! That is a beautiful dashboard.. I wish I had the designer fingers and understanding on how to make something like this.. I am in process of switching from Wink to hubitat and am loving everything I can do with hubitat that was painful with wink (minus missing my Nest integration but i'm getting over that). Could i ask you what you are displaying this dashboard on and how you got started designing this? Thanks and again great dashboard!!
Thanks @marktheknife, i'll take a look into it.. i would really like to get a better at the designing aspect of the dashboard.. i can do the rules without an issue, but like i said i just have no designing abilities lol.. Thanks again for the advise, I will certain take a look at it.
I agree with you. But if I'm being honest, and I love my HE, if I had a friend who wanted this kind of thing, HE wouldn't be what I recommended. I likely would have recommended Wink and now probably said "I don't know that a product exists on the market that meets your needs"
@marktheknife is correct I use smartly for all my dashes. The above dash is a slightly modified setup of smartly. It still uses the smartly base as a jumping off point and many of the settings.
Despite what you see above I'm not good at design or creativity. That dash has been 1year plus of changes and tweaks with input from lots of people include the missus. The smartly team has done a fabulous job of making dashboard easy to work with. I highly recommend you check out the link posted and if you have any questions post there or tag me for help.
Not at all, I think you were spot on. I'm just saying it's unlikely that HE will, or even desires to be, the "one hub to rule them all." Sometimes when you try to conquer too many things at once (especially for a company that's probably less than 10 people) you fail at everything when you could have succeeded at a smaller number of goals. I've worked for a bunch of smaller entrepreneurial tech companies. They come up with a new idea and eyes light up, "we're all going to be millionaires!!!" and then you realize you tried to do too much at once and the company folds.
Being the "one hub to rule them all" no but... I'm kinda betting they'd love to sell as many as they could. Easy-to-build slick dashboards (with data graphs) sell, even if you're more into the automation than display, it's basic marketing.
As much as everyone argues it's not important/not a priority/of un-measurable value; the OP's dashboard comments have come up a whole lot before his post, and a whole lot since.
Like in many other cases in HE-land, the fact that people have worked around it (and can) to get what they want ...is not so much a sign of strength as lost opportunity.
In a general sense, sure I guess. But since we’re neither staff nor investors, it’s pointless to resurrect threads that are two years old and otherwise long dead just to lecture the staff on how to grow their business.
I came upon this thread looking at the evolution of comments about Dashboards. Is there some time limit on threads? Dang, clue me in if so.
The immediate defense of the points here reminds me when we had large teams of programmers working on projects, and when the end user test group or marketing came in and said, "that could be nicer/easier/more friendly" the programmers said..."nah, just get use to it, we did".
Then the programmers were reminded who the customers were, or that we actually wanted to sell a lot of this software, to non-programmers...gasp.
To b be fair, we shouldn't dismiss requests from relatively newer members compared to ourselves just because they have been discussed to some sense of a conclusion previously. We should at least acknowledge, digest and explain why we feel the previous points made are still relevant. Times do change, including priorities, so re-invogorating old conversations is not a bad thing.... Admittedly that sounds "high-and-mighty", mostly because I have enjoyed my recent foray into dashboard design / development ...
There has always seemed an appetite for latching onto what users want and what the HE staff have capacity and capability to deliver, so we shouldn't discourage initiating old topics of conversation so early....
That said, I'm not trying to take sides here, one solution is not better than another.. I chart most of my metrics using influxdb / grafana on an rpi4.... but don't want to stifle conversation in the process...
Thanks for your feedback. We know that the built-in dashboard is in need for enhancements, and it is on our radar for 2022. However, Hubitat's priority has been to deliver a solid home automation platform, first. A dashboard is less of an automation tool and more of a remote control tool.
