[Feature] Make Wall mode customizable

[trinitrion]

Current behavior

When Overview is switched into Wall Mode, it shows a fixed set of widgets/panels that can't be changed.

Request

1. Make the widgets shown in Wall Mode configurable — let users choose which panels (tasks, calendar, meals, etc.) appear and in what layout, instead of a fixed set.
2. Add a way to enable Wall Mode directly from the Overview page, rather than only through a separate flow. Suggest an optional toggle button in Settings to show/hide this shortcut in Overview.

[mild227]

Would love this (also your other ideas). Yuvomi is not really good for wall tablets at the moment

[ulsklyc]

@mild227 Thanks - and "not really good for wall tablets at the moment" is the more useful half of that, so let me answer it rather than just noting the +1.

@trinitrion asked for two things, and they are much further apart in cost than they look.

The shortcut into Wall mode is easy and should just happen. Reaching a display mode through a separate flow, on the device whose whole job is to show that display, is backwards. That is a button and a preference for whether it is shown, and there is no design question hiding in it.

Configurable widgets is where the honest answer is more interesting. Wall mode looks like the dashboard but is not built like it. The dashboard is a grid of tiles you arrange; Wall mode is a fixed program - a schedule column, who is on duty, weather, a clock - laid out for a specific job: readable across a room, from a device nobody is holding. Even the row caps are picked for that distance. It is a composed view, not a container.

Making it configurable therefore is not "expose the existing tile config to a second surface". Dashboard tiles assume a hand's width and a pointer; several of them are unreadable at three metres and useless without touch. Letting people place them on a wall display would mostly produce bad wall displays, and then the complaint becomes that Wall mode looks worse than it used to.

So the question I would want answered before building anything - and this is where your comment helps most - is which fixed choice is actually wrong for you. Choosing freely from all widgets is one answer. But it might be that Wall mode simply shows the wrong things for your household: the weather panel is dead weight if you have a window, the duty roster is noise if you live alone. Turning off panels it already has is a much smaller change than a layout editor, and it may well be the whole of what people want.

Concretely: what is on your wall tablet right now that you would remove, and what is missing? Same question to anyone else reading this with a tablet on the wall. That answer decides whether this is a handful of toggles or a second layout system.

Staying open.

[mild227]

@ulsklyc
Hey, thank you for taking the time to answer this.
My comment was not very helpful, sorry about that. Also after thinking about it, the wall mode is not really the problem for me.
It is mainly the size limitations of tablet screens, for example my tablet is 10.1 inches and i have it in landscape mode on the wall.

At the moment yuvomi lets me choose 4 different layouts for a module on the dashboard, but it scales them way too big most of the time with much empty screen.

One solution could be to set custom sizes for each widget, or maybe a fifth mode for super minimal information only.

Another solution could be to create „containers“ (like size limited areas on the main dashboard) on a dashboard where you put in widgets and the max scaling is the container size ( hard to describe, maybe you know tableau dahsboards, thats how you build it there).

I would love to get all the information i need on the main screen without scrolling.
completely hiding the sidebar would also help, maybe with one button at the top left to show it again.

[ulsklyc]

@trinitrion Your second point shipped in v2.60.0: wall mode can now be started from the overview page, where until then it could only be left. Switching it on from the settings still works as before.

It differs from what you suggested in one respect, deliberately. You proposed an optional toggle in settings to show or hide the shortcut. The entry point is always visible instead, with no switch - a setting whose only job is to hide one button adds a decision for every household in order to spare one of them a button, and the entry point had to earn being there without one: it does not navigate anywhere, changes nothing on the server, stays on the device it is pressed on, and is operable from two metres away. If it turns out to be in the way in practice, that is worth hearing.

Leaving this open for your first point, which is the larger one: making the widgets and layout in wall mode configurable. That has not been built and is not a variation of the entry point - it needs its own decisions about what is configurable and where that configuration lives.