Use Case / Scenario Background:
I see valid use cases for using ph-ash as a dashboard on "kiosk like" Systems. That means there is a screen running, but no real input devices. This can either be a Tablet, mounted in kios mode, or it can be screen combined with a small computer (e.g. raspberry). These dashboards can be mounted in shared offices, or as "companion device" in smaller offices (mounted at a wall or separate desk). A team can have the dashboard at a central position in the office, and get information about the status of their application(s). Another advantage of such a setup is, that it can run independently from any fat clients. You can concentrate on your work and still have the dashboard visually present in the room.
But: Without having any input device present at the dashboard, any mouse over effects do not work, and it is hard to see at a first glance which tile belongs to which component/check.
Description of Feature:
Giving a config option to provide a text label to a tile. A simple label, that identifies the tile. The most luxurious option would be to have a label that scales in size together with the tile, but as a starting point a label can be a simple text with fixed (configurable) size.
Implementation suggestions:
As I do not know the details of how the tile size scaling is implemented, following some ideas about implementation.
As a simple label does not need to be a multiple line text block, it can be limited to one line or a fixed number of characters. It should be a label, not the next harry potter novel.
For scaling the label a fixed ratio of tile width to text size can be set. This might have the disadvantage that very small tiles have tiny labels that are very hard to read. I consider this an issue of how the user uses his dashboard, and not a design issue that needs to be solved by the developers. Users can still decide to not use labels and have a large number of tiny tiny tiles. Or they use labels, but are ok with them only being clearly readable when the tile scales big in case of an issue.
A more code oriented approach would be to only show the label when the text size reaches a certain minimal threshold.
If it is too complicated to use text and text size, it might be another approach to either use png/jpg or (better) vector graphics svg instead, and place them on the tile / fill the tile. Transforming text to an image file is easily possible with third party tools and libraries (e.g. this implementation in php https://github.com/kartsims/easysvg ). Imagemagick or inkscape offer this feature as well.
I know about the "keep it simple" approach of ph-ash, but I consider simple labels not as a fancy "nice to have" feature but a necessary layer of information to any dashboard (especially when it runs in a kiosk mode setup or on a "companion device").
Use Case / Scenario Background:
I see valid use cases for using ph-ash as a dashboard on "kiosk like" Systems. That means there is a screen running, but no real input devices. This can either be a Tablet, mounted in kios mode, or it can be screen combined with a small computer (e.g. raspberry). These dashboards can be mounted in shared offices, or as "companion device" in smaller offices (mounted at a wall or separate desk). A team can have the dashboard at a central position in the office, and get information about the status of their application(s). Another advantage of such a setup is, that it can run independently from any fat clients. You can concentrate on your work and still have the dashboard visually present in the room.
But: Without having any input device present at the dashboard, any mouse over effects do not work, and it is hard to see at a first glance which tile belongs to which component/check.
Description of Feature:
Giving a config option to provide a text label to a tile. A simple label, that identifies the tile. The most luxurious option would be to have a label that scales in size together with the tile, but as a starting point a label can be a simple text with fixed (configurable) size.
Implementation suggestions:
As I do not know the details of how the tile size scaling is implemented, following some ideas about implementation.
As a simple label does not need to be a multiple line text block, it can be limited to one line or a fixed number of characters. It should be a label, not the next harry potter novel.
For scaling the label a fixed ratio of tile width to text size can be set. This might have the disadvantage that very small tiles have tiny labels that are very hard to read. I consider this an issue of how the user uses his dashboard, and not a design issue that needs to be solved by the developers. Users can still decide to not use labels and have a large number of tiny tiny tiles. Or they use labels, but are ok with them only being clearly readable when the tile scales big in case of an issue.
A more code oriented approach would be to only show the label when the text size reaches a certain minimal threshold.
If it is too complicated to use text and text size, it might be another approach to either use png/jpg or (better) vector graphics svg instead, and place them on the tile / fill the tile. Transforming text to an image file is easily possible with third party tools and libraries (e.g. this implementation in php https://github.com/kartsims/easysvg ). Imagemagick or inkscape offer this feature as well.
I know about the "keep it simple" approach of ph-ash, but I consider simple labels not as a fancy "nice to have" feature but a necessary layer of information to any dashboard (especially when it runs in a kiosk mode setup or on a "companion device").