I’ll see what I can do to conserve even more memory with the calendar cards. To get a clear picture of what we are working with here, could you download these iCal files to your computer (just paste the same link in a web browser, it will probably prompt you to save it somewhere) and tell me the file sizes?
Thanks!
the files are 1068KB and 232KB.
KB? that is really small. I expected this to be in the 40 - 100 MB range. 
Thanks.
I am going to change how the cards work. The download iCal card will filter a date range and convert it into JSON. Then, the card that transforms that into Markdown will always use today as its anchor point for filtering. That way, you only need to download each iCal file once, and you can generate multiple Markdown files from it as long as the JSON covers the required date range.
lol 100MB, that would be somewhere close to 500k appointments.
But appreciate you are investigating it. Just let me know if I can help
NEW Dashboard Studio TEST Version 2.0.12
Big update. Lots of things I was working on for the 2.0 version and finally ready for testing.
- New: Glass Effects: Widgets can blur what sits behind them, with customizable inner glow, surface opacity, and outline styling across switches, buttons, sliders, menus, gauges, and light grid tiles.
- New: Built in Themes: Added new themes including 19 glass themes featuring translucent frosted glass styling.
- New: Glass Conversion Themes: Instantly transform any dashboard into a frosted glass look or reset back to flat styling using the Convert Flat to Glass and Convert Glass to Flat adjustment themes.
- New: Theme Preset Editor: A dedicated workspace tool in Editor Tools lets you compare, customize, export, import, and batch edit full themes and adjustment themes in a side by side grid.
- New: Theme Color Adjustments: Fine tune any theme palette with Hue Shift, Saturation, Brightness, and Contrast sliders in Theme Colors.
- New: Custom Shape Containers: Container widgets can create custom polygon shapes with draggable corners, individual corner radiuses, and grid snapping.
- New: Text Drop Shadow: Text widgets can display a drop shadow behind markdown text with customizable opacity, color, and blur.
- New: Movable and Resizable Dialogs: Drag dialog windows by their titlebars and resize gallery windows from their corners.
- New: Landing and Return Page: After a quiet period the dashboard can go back to the home page or another page you choose, and optionally open on that page when the dashboard loads.
- Improved: Menu Audio: Sounds are set on the main audio setting instead of on each item.
- Improved: Image and Audio Galleries: Select multiple files using Ctrl or Command click or Shift click for batch deletion, and double click an image or sound clip to preview or play it.
- Improved: Inspector Layout: Controls sharing a row distribute their space equally.
- Fixed: Resume and Wake Freeze: Minimizing and restoring or waking the dashboard no longer freezes the screen.
- Fixed: Switch Icon Hover: Hover color works when the switch or button is off.
- Fixed: Select Behind: Middle click can select the widget under a group when group members overlap.
- Fixed: Small Bug Fixes and UI Improvements: A collection of minor UI improvements and small bug fixes.
Glass Effects and Themes
I finally added proper frosted glass styling across the board. You can now enable background blur on widgets to frost whatever sits underneath them on the canvas, paired with surface opacity, outline opacity, and soft inner glow across switches, buttons, sliders, menus, gauges, and light grid tiles.
To make using them easy without tuning numbers by hand, I bundled a lot of new themes, with nineteen full glass variations.
What girl wouldn’t want a themed dashboard like that in her room?
I also added two adjustment themes called Convert Flat to Glass and Convert Glass to Flat, so you can change glass styling across your existing custom dashboard or strip it back with a single click.
Theme Preset Editor and Color Adjustments
Managing all these themes was getting tedious, so I built a dedicated Theme Preset Editor under Editor Tools where you can inspect builtin and personal themes side by side, batch apply settings across columns, and import or export them. Not really meant for end-users. But left it in.
The Theme Colors Section is improved with a complete set of color correction sliders with Hue Shift, Saturation, Brightness, and Contrast.
These adjusts ALL colors of the theme at once! Now you can adjust every theme Easilly to your taste.
Custom Shape Containers
I have added a “Custom Shape” mode to containers.
You can drag corner points anywhere on the canvas, dial in separate corner radiuses for each point, and snap vertices right to the canvas grid. Turn the toggle off and it behaves like the classic rounded rectangle.
Text Drop Shadow
Markdown text widgets can now cast a drop shadow.
You can customize shadow opacity, pick a blur radius, and select any color or theme token. It gives titles and telemetry values plenty of separation so they stay perfectly readable over bright photos or translucent glass panels.
Landing and Return Page
You can set the dashboard to automatically jump back to your home page or another favourite page after a quiet period without touches. If you set this page, the page to be the default landing page whenever the dashboard first boots up. Otherwise the open page the dashboard was saved in, will be the page that shows first when opening the dashboard.
Menu Audio
Setting up audio clips inside the Menu widget was way too tedious when assigning sounds item by item.
I ripped out the per item sound inputs and moved audio configuration up to the main widget settings. You set your sound effects once for selection, toggle on, and toggle off, and the entire menu uses them consistently. This is a breaking change. I you have set sound effects on menu items, you need to recreate them again.
Performance and Interaction Fixes
A bug was causing (Really large) dashboards to freeze for a long time when restoring a minimized browser window or waking a tablet screen, which I resolved by reworking the state snapshot matching so waking up feels instant. I also cleaned up the inspector layout so settings sharing a row distribute space evenly, fixed switch icons so hover colors work when turned off, improved middle click selection under overlapping groups, and polished dialog button clipping.
Other
Fixed 
Fixed Middle mouse button clicks or ALT + CLICK now selects also behind groups.
Nice and big update! Still version 2.0.x with all this new functionality?
My dash resume time went from ~25 seconds to ~2 seconds.
Could you tell a bit more about this?
Still need to release the 2.0 version stable.
But I think it is getting close, unless someone finds a bug again. All the performance improvements are notorious for creating unwanted edge cases.
Left is the previous version, and right is the latest one. Each row of settings now uses the full width, with all settings sharing that space equally.
I am still working on it though. I really want to reduce the number of settings and simplify things, even though every single setting is necessary. I am debating whether to hide the individual controls and add a few sliders that tweak multiple settings in the background. For example, the new “glass” style takes around five different settings to pull off. So a single “glass” slider while users could still open that up to tweak the individual values if they want. The real puzzle is figuring out what happens when someone changes a single setting, because I am not sure how to translate that custom change back to the main slider.
It is a lot like the color correction sliders in the theme colors section, which works great. With a couple of sliders you can adjust all colors. For the next version, I will probably make that the primary control and tuck the individual color options into an extra slide out panel.
Dashboard Studio has gradually become quite complex. Yes, I know that this is partly due to my requests.
Please bear in mind that, in my estimation, a few users of the dashboard software have a background in graphic design.
In-depth color settings would likely make it too complex for users like me. The “Hue” concept is common on Apple devices (which hold a 20% share of the PC market) and are widely used by graphic designers. Hue is less prominent in Windows (which holds a 70% share).
Yes… you are the last person who should complain that it has too many options. 
You are by far the biggest contributor to adding complexity to Dashboard Studio
Agreed. I will rename Hue to Color Tone, and Saturation to Color Intensity.
I am not going to remove it. I think this is a very powerful feature for changing entire color themes easily.
Hover colors & behind-group-selection seems to work fine now, thanks.
Loading time on older/slower devices has greatly improved !!
My old tablet took about 15 seconds to load (from scratch), now only 7.
In my car (so: remote) also took about 15 seconds, now like 5.
On a decent Android Phone is ‘in the blink of an eye’. Even remotely it only takes 1-2 seconds. Happy with that!
Is there a way to use a formula in a widget? Reason I ask is that I use a widget to display the remaining charging minutes for my car. The data comes in as total number of minutes, but I’d like to display it as 2h15m instead of 135m. TIA!
Yes, you can. Though this is a complicated one. Click the binding options (sliders button when you hover above it)
and paste this formula:
round((value / 60) - 0.5) + "h" + (value - (round((value / 60) - 0.5) * 60)) + "m"
Or if you want a leading 0 on the minutes:
round((value / 60) - 0.5) + "h" + if((value - (round((value / 60) - 0.5) * 60)) < 10, "0", "") + (value - (round((value / 60) - 0.5) * 60)) + "m"
Here is the documentation about the binding options and formulas.
The easiest way to build more complicated formulas is just copying the documentation. You can hit the copy button right above the title when you hover over it, then paste that straight into an AI prompt as reference along with what you actually want to do.
Super, thanks again!
Fair point. Let me offer some suggestions for simplifying the dashboard definition without sacrificing functionality.
Suggestions (there is some overlap among the points below):
- Allow users to specify which parameters to use for each widget within the global Dashboard Settings.
If you always want the same values, or if a parameter isn’t relevant to your specific use case, you could configure it so that the parameter(s) don’t appear when building a dashboard widget. This provides a clearer view of the parameters that are relevant to your setup. - When using the dashboard wizard, allow quick access to the global Dashboard settings for that specific widget to toggle options on or off (without retroactive effect).
Example: If I use an icon widget, only the icon itself varies, while dimensions, colors, borders, fonts, etc., remain constant. Hiding the static components makes the interface less cluttered. In some cases, you might want the flexibility to deviate from these defaults. - Limit the number of fonts per widget. Why does a Gauge need four fonts and a Text widget nine?
- From a graphic designer’s perspective, I understand the vast array of color settings, but I wonder how many of these are actually used by Dashboard Studio users (yes, I’m treading on thin ice here). Perhaps you could ask about this on the forum.
The list above is intended to help brainstorm solutions for the growing complexity. Complexity partly driven by my own requests for additional features, which I am actually very happy with.
The challenge now is to make complex elements simple, or at least simpler.
I really do not think anyone wants to go through enabling or disabling every single parameter just to make their own version of Dashboard Studio less cluttered.
Have you tried basic mode yet? That is pretty much what it does already. It hides all the advanced settings and custom styling options, leaving only the essential configuration parameters while everything else relies on presets.
That is because every element requiring distinct typography (like header 1, header 2, header 3, a table header row, paragraphs, and so on) has its own typography slide out menu. These slide out menus are consistent across the board and share the exact same configurable options, such as font size, bold, italic, offsets, and font family. Before version 1.5 it was a complete mess. Some settings supported bold while others did not, some allowed custom fonts while others did not, and everything was scattered all over the appearance section. Now it is completely uniform. You definitely do not have to give every item a different font, but if you want to, you know exactly where to find it.
Besides, there is a bigger issue here: I cannot reduce the number of settings. They have to stay, otherwise all dashboards relying on them will break.
There is no need for that, because I am not going to reduce the number of colors anyway. I can’t, as I mentioned, doing that would break existing dashboards.
The separate theme color section was already a massive improvement. Before theme colors was introduced, all widget default settings used their own configurable colors, which made changing a color across the entire dashboard way more complicated.
I also doubt many people tweak every single one, but I can easily see a company using Dashboard Studio on office displays to show info to clients and matching them to corporate brand colors. Plus, the new color sliders that adjust all 24 colors simultaneously are a massive improvement for updating all theme colors easily.
Sliders like that feel like the real solution for simplifying complex settings. As I suggested earlier, imagine a single slider for something like a glass effect that tweaks five settings under the hood. If someone wants fine control, those detailed options are still right there when opening the panel. I can see that working in several scenarios. The only real puzzle right now is deciding what the sliders should do when someone has already customized individual settings.
Anyway, as mentioned, basic mode is already there. If people find things too complex, they can just use basic mode, and I can definitely streamline that mode even further. That said, I doubt many people have actually tried it yet, since I have not seen any feedback on it so far.
AI summary:
User suggest simplifying the Dashboard Studio interface by hiding or merging settings, typography, and colors, while the developer emphasizes that existing options must be preserved for backward compatibility and that introducing and further refining ‘Basic Mode’ is the appropriate solution.
My summary: further simplification is hardly possible.
Do other forum members have any suggestions, or is there no need for simplification, which is also perfectly fine?
Variables are Read-only
You can see this by the [R] indicator.
See (documentation):
This is a Homey limitation I have not solved yet. If you want to set a homey variable you need to do this with a flow:
For me simplification is not necessary.
I probably use only 5% of the possibilities, I don’t even use all widgets.
But it doesn’t bother me that there’s tons of features there that I don’t use.
Now & then I try something out to see what it does, only to disover that it’s a wonderful possibility…just not for me.
But i understand that other people have dashboards that are a 1000 times as complex as mine. It’s great that Satoer implicates al thes functions!
Just like any other program in fact: I hardly use Excel either. I find out the few formulas that I need or want, but there’s no need to disable all the ones that I don’t use.
In DS you already have the option for Basic Editor, which is more than necessary…
(in my opinion!)
I am open to suggestions, but keep in mind that they cannot just be things like “Yeah, scrap this, scrap that.” Almost every addition beyond V1.1 in Dashboard Studio is there because of community requests. Users wanted the functionality, so I added it. Removing features just to simplify things would break compatibility with older dashboards. It really cannot be something like “yeah, remove all those audio features or confirmation dialog stuff because I do not use them.” Someone else might have desperately needed them. ( 
) So the suggestions should be possible solutions to simplify the look and feel, without loosing any of the actual options.
Dashboard Studio is a bit like my home. It is way too small for all the stuff we have, but the wife and kids keep buying things anyway, so I am constantly building smart cabinets to store all of it haha.
That is pretty much my opinion too. I try to hide related settings when they are not in use so things look less cluttered. For anyone who finds it overwhelming, there is always the Basic Mode. If even that feels too complex, then the native Homey Dashboard is probably the more sensible choice.
I really like the Excel comparison. Most people probably use about 1% of what it can do. If you think you are way past that 1%, take a look at this lunatic that build a 3D ray tracing engine to visualize 3D objects right inside Excel cells
