Tiles that do more

Most tiles show one device. These are the ways a tile can do more on a dashboard.

Show a tile only when it matters

When to show, a tab in every tile’s settings, keeps a tile out of sight until it matters: the washing machine while it runs, the guest tiles in guest mode, the morning tiles in the morning. Choose Only when… and add conditions:

• A value, picked as you pick any value: a device’s reading, a Logic variable, who is home, or an energy or price value. Then test it: yes or no, above or below a number, or one of its choices.
• The time: between two times, also past midnight, on the days you pick.

With more than one, choose whether all of these or any of these must hold. A sentence under them says it in words.

Hide while it has nothing to show hides a tile while its widget is empty, like Busy now when nothing runs.

• On Desktop and a tablet the tile’s place stays empty, so nothing moves around. On a phone the tiles below close up.
• In edit mode every tile shows. A hidden one is dimmed with Hidden now and why, so you can still change it.
• It works the same on share links and paired screens. Something a condition can’t read there, such as who is home on a share link, counts as met, so a tile never disappears by accident.

Tiles inside a widget

Some widgets hold tiles of their own: a room card with its lights, a row of scene buttons, a widget of yours that gathers a few devices. Such a widget has a Tiles field in its settings (a widget you make yourself gets one with a Tiles setting).

Arrange… in that field opens a window named after it, such as Tiles in Ground floor. It saves as you go; Done closes it.

• Add tiles opens the widget picker: your devices, flows, moods and Other. The widget can limit what you add, and a widget that holds tiles itself can’t go inside another.
• Move and resize the tiles on the widget’s own grid. A tile inside has its own Configure…, Style… and When to show, like any tile.
• A widget can also have pages, shown as tabs. + adds one. A page’s menu has Name and icon…, When to show… (a page can hide itself like a tile), Move left, Move right and Remove page…. Removing a page asks first, because its tiles go with it; there is no undo. A widget keeps at least one page and holds at most 12.
• A tile’s menu has Move to page and Remove (with Undo).

A widget holds at most 128 tiles, and a dashboard 1000 in all. Tiles inside a widget are part of it: they are the same on every screen size, and they move with the widget. They keep their own look: a tile inside doesn’t take on the style of the tile that holds it, so a Style… on the outer tile (its background, accent colour, corners) reaches only the widget itself.

Put into moves tiles you already have into a widget. In edit mode, select the tiles, then choose Put into on the toolbar and the widget, and the page when it has them (Ground floor › Kitchen). The tiles keep their size and take the first free spots. If they don’t all fit, none moves and it says there is no room. Undo in the message takes them out again. Headings, and widgets that hold tiles themselves, can’t be put in.

Take out is in a tile’s menu inside the window. The tile goes back to the dashboard at the first free spot, on every size, with a New here tag on sizes you arranged. Undo puts it back.

Removing a widget removes the tiles inside it, and the message says how many (Tile and the 6 tiles inside it removed). Undo brings them all back, with their pages, settings and When to show. Duplicate copies them too.

When the widget changes

Tiles need a Tiles setting to be in. When a change would leave some without one, Tiledash asks first and says how many go, such as Change to Room card? The 6 tiles inside it go. Say no and nothing changes. It asks when:

• you change a tile’s widget in its settings (Look) to one that has no place for them;
• you save a widget of yours, go back to an earlier save, or turn Use mine instead of the built-in on or off, and the Tiles setting is gone;
• you delete a widget of yours, or uninstall or change the version of one from the community.

When the new widget has exactly one Tiles setting where the old one had exactly one, the tiles move over to it and nothing is asked. A community update that would remove a Tiles setting waits for you instead of installing itself.

Stack tiles

A Stack puts several tiles on pages in one spot of your dashboard, so a small screen can hold more than it has room for. Each page is a small grid of tiles of its own, and only the page you are looking at is drawn and live. A stack is a widget like any other, described in the widget gallery. Open its settings to choose how it changes page, under Switch pages:

• With tabs: a row of tabs at the top or the bottom, or a column of them on the left or right (Tabs at), showing each page’s name, its icon or both (Tabs show). Tab look draws them as a pill, an underline, a segmented track, Like the Navigation bar or glass; Icon and name puts the icon beside the name or over it; Tabs take makes them as big as they need or spreads them over the whole bar (over its height on a side), and Tabs sit at puts tabs that don’t fill the bar at its start, middle or end. The tab bar is part of the stack or floats, and Pages change by sliding, fading or at once.
• By swiping: a row of dots, and you swipe sideways to turn the page.
• By itself: dots, and it turns to the next page every few seconds (Turn to the next page every, 3 to 300), round to the first after the last. A thin line runs down to the next turn, and it waits 30 seconds after a touch. You can always swipe too.

Tab size makes the tabs and the dots small, medium or large. The default, Bigger on touch screens, gives them the medium size on a tablet or wall panel, where a finger taps them, and the small one with a mouse. A column of tabs on a side is never narrower than a comfortable tap.

While you edit the dashboard, the page a stack shows has a + Widget at its bottom right: it opens the stack on that page and the widget picker, to put a widget straight into it.

Start on page picks the page a screen opens on, and Back to it after returns there after a while without a touch, handy on a wall panel.

A tab view on a tablet

Under Where (on the Layout tab of its settings) a stack sits On the grid like any tile, or flush against a side of the screen: next to the sidebar when it shows, else against the screen’s edge, the window’s whole height, keeping the width its tile has. The dashboard’s title and other tiles move over. Where and Tabs at can differ per screen size: the size switch above the settings opens on the size you are looking at, so a stack can sit flush on the left with its tabs on its side on a tablet, and at the bottom with its tabs at the bottom on a phone. A size you leave alone follows Desktop.

A page’s tab

In a stack’s Arrange…, a page tab’s menu has Its tab…: a Badge on the tab (how many of the page’s tiles are on, or a dot while something holds, as a pulsing alert if you like), Open by itself (the page turns up when something starts to hold, such as the doorbell ringing, unless someone touched the screen in the last 30 seconds) and a Colour for its tab. Copy a link to this tab copies an address that opens the dashboard with the stack on that page.

The stack’s own styling, such as its tab bar’s colours, corners and width on a side, and its pages’ background and padding, is under the Stack tab of the Style dialog.

To make a stack from tiles you already have, in edit mode select them and choose Stack these on the toolbar:

• As one page puts all of them on one page, in the places they had relative to each other.
• One page each makes a page for every tile, named after it and with its icon, and the tile fills the page.

The tiles keep their settings, style and When to show. The stack goes where the selected tiles began, at the first free spot if that is taken; on sizes you arranged it is marked New here. Undo in the message (4 tiles stacked) puts every tile back where it was. A stack takes at most 12 pages, and headings and widgets that hold tiles themselves can’t go in.

The other ways in:

• Put into on the toolbar has New stack, which makes a stack with the selected tiles on one page.
• Stack, also on the toolbar, opens the widget picker with nothing selected. Tick the tiles to stack, and each becomes a page of a new stack (Stack 4 tiles).
• Stack under Other in the widget picker adds an empty stack, to fill from Arrange….

To change a stack, edit the dashboard and double-click the stack, or choose Arrange… in its menu. The stack opens up where it is, with the rest of the dashboard faded: its pages are its tabs, and its tiles move and resize on its own grid, each with its menu, as on the dashboard. Add, rename and move pages with the tabs, and Add tiles on the toolbar adds to the page that shows. Done, Escape or a tap beside the stack goes back to the whole dashboard, and the stack then shows the page you left it on. On the Tablet and Phone sizes, where a stack is drawn smaller, Arrange… opens its tiles in a window instead, as for any widget with tiles.

Select other tiles and choose Put into, then the stack and its page, to add them. Take out in a tile’s menu sends it back to the dashboard. A page, like a tile, can hide itself with When to show…; a page with no tile showing is skipped, and a stack with nothing to show says Nothing in this stack yet. Turn on Hide while it has nothing to show in its When to show to hide the stack itself then.

Each screen remembers the page it was on, so a wall panel, a tablet and a share link each come back to their own after a reload. An e-ink screen never turns pages by itself, even set to By itself: it stays on its page until someone turns it. Screens with a very basic browser, such as some e-readers, don’t draw a stack’s pages yet: they show them empty.