in today's video we're going to be having a look
at five new features that i really like in the recent 2022.2 update check it out
what's going on guys i hope you're all doing well it is indeed that time of year again my birthday
and i know that's not why you're all here you're here to find out about five new features that
just dropped in the recent release but while you are here and i do have your attention why
not head to the description below and check out a gofundme fundraiser that i'm currently running
this fundraiser is for a charity that's near and dear to me and if you do happen to have a penny
or a pound and you want to just help contribute to this amazing charity then please do a massive
thank you to everybody that has already donated it means a lot to me and also to the charity as well
as the families and children that that charity supports if you are interested in finding out why
it means so much to me then you can find all that information in that gofundme link and there is
also a short video there that you can also check out and with all that said let's jump straight
into it so the first thing that you will probably notice with this update is that it's update 2022.2
there was no 2022.1 update this year so there is only going to be 11 releases for the whole of 2022
but just because there was no january release it doesn't mean that the home assistant developers
just stopped working and that the people in the community just stopped contributing
because in fact they all carried on and just so you can see how much they did carry on
here's the stats for the 2022.2 release so with that release there were over 2 645 pull requests
there was 5 000 files changed there was over 177 000 lines of code change and there was over
55 000 removed there was just loads way too many for me to cover in just one video which is why
we're only going to be covering five if you're interested in having a read up on all of the new
features the new changes the new integrations and most importantly the breaking changes
then i'll have a link to the official home assistant blog post in the description below
or maybe you'd actually like to hear the guys that create and actually do all the work to make home
assistant possible talk about the latest release in which case why not head over to the official
home assistant youtube page there you'll find a link to the 2022.2 release party and the release
party gets live streamed every first wednesday of the month to accommodate the new update so if you
wanted to ask the developer some questions about the new features or maybe you just want to hang
out with the community then it's a great place to be on the first wednesday of the month the main
focus for the 11 releases of 2022 are going to be on streamlining home assistant so whether that's
streamlining existing features and services or adding new ones or even rewriting parts of home
assistant to make it more streamlined then that's going to be the focus but just because this is the
focus it doesn't mean we're going to miss out on getting new features and new services and if you
have a look at the recent release and the way that that's gone then those new features and services
don't show any signs of slowing down let's kick this off with our first streamline feature then
the media browser or as it's now known media in addition to its shortened name media now features
this beautiful cover flow design and also a media toolbar that's going to allow you to control your
various different home assistant media players as well as this the experience for browser media
has been vastly improved and i'm a big fan of the cover flow design another cool feature is the fact
that integrations can now browse media sources provided by other integrations a good example
of this is if you make use of sonar speakers and the spotify service so you can browse your spotify
playlist and then you can just play them on your sonos devices this overhaul for media has been
a huge improvement both visually and in terms of usability and it's a great step forward in making
home assistant more streamlined moving on to our next feature then and this one's going to answer
an all-important home assistant question how do i check for updates no longer are you going
to be sat there in the home assistant release party restarting and refreshing all the various
parts of home assistant instead what you can now do is just sit inside the configuration panel
and hit the top three dots in the top right corner and just click check for updates if there are any
updates for home assistant they'll pop up here and if not you'll just see a little notification
to tell you that there are none available on to our third feature then which is the ability to
download diagnostics for integrations and devices this particular feature isn't really an end user
feature but what it will do is it will allow developers to quickly fix bugs and also enhance
and improve features based on this diagnostic data so end users can download this data as a plain
text file and inside of that text file you'll find the json for a particular integration or
a device that you're looking at this can then be shared through the home assistant issue tracker
and then the developers have access to information and data that they otherwise wouldn't have
none of the downloaded diagnostics contain any personal user information and if this is
something you're worried about you can always just read through the text file before you send it on
next up we've got the button helper and button template in the previous release the button
entity was added and since then a common question seems to have been how do i create my own button
entity creating a button helper simple from the configuration page you're going to want to choose
automations and scenes then along the top you're going to want to choose helpers and from here
you're going to want to press add helper in the bottom right corner you can then just select the
button helper and you can assign it a name and an icon and just simply press create and once you've
done that you can just make use of the button helper the same as you would with any of your
other helpers if you're a fan of templating then there is now also a templating entity for buttons
and there have also been some great enhancements for templating in this update let's wrap this up
then and have a look at our final feature which is scene states historically scenes never really had
a proper state they just had a state of scene in which wouldn't be super helpful and you couldn't
really build any proper automations based on this now when a scene's run it will record
the last timestamp of when it was activated and this is great in terms of automations because
we can do a couple of things based on this for example you could trigger an automation based on
when a scene gets activated and this can trigger further automations and actions within your home
another great thing about this is it gets recorded into your logbook so you can actually find out
when a particular scene was activated and you can even find out who activated that scene and there
we go guys that's been a quick look at five new features in the 2022.2 update there's plenty of
other features and improvements that were added in this update but those were just five that
i really liked some other updates worth checking out if you're interested with updates to nabucassa
if you watched the state of open home then you'll know that annual subscriptions were planned for
nabucasa and this has now started rolling out so it's starting in the u.s and it's going to slowly
roll out to the countries but you'll be able to purchase an annual subscription to nabucassa
if you're interested in checking out the annual subscriptions then i'll leave a
link to it in the description below it's also worth pointing out here that the monthly fee
for nabukasa is going to increase in a couple of months if you're an existing naboo casa user
the other thing worth mentioning is the improved infrastructure so last week the infrastructure
was upgraded and since then the amazon echo and google integrations have been much much quicker
and more reliable so you now shouldn't get those cases where you ask the echo to do something
and then it will tell you that it couldn't do it but it actually did if you've enjoyed
this video then don't forget to drop me a like and if you're not already and you want to see
more videos like this then don't forget to hit that subscribe button and if you ding-dong that
notification bell you'll be alerted to any future video that i do as always a massive thank you to
these awesome dudes these awesome dudes on my patreons if you're interested in helping support
my channel which in turn allows me to create videos like this then you'll find a link to my
patreon in the description below so thank you for watching and i'll catch you in the next one cheers
you