in today's video we're going to be having a look at five features that
i'd like to see added to home assistant in 2022 check it out
what's going on guys i hope you're all doing well in a previous video we had a look at 12
of my favorite features that were added across the course of 2021 and if you did happen to miss
that you will find it linked above and also in the description below so go and check that out
and if we move on from the past to the present and future these are five features that i'd like
to see added across 2022 some of them might be a little bit ambitious and some of them might not be
super practical but i'll let you guys be the judge of that and if you do have your own ideas and your
thoughts or features that you'd like to see added then let me know what they are in the comments
below let's kick this off with the first feature then and if you've been in the home assistant
bubble for a little while then you will have definitely heard of this one even if you haven't
yet seen it and it is of course drag and drop for lovelace drag and drop for lovelace is pretty much
exactly what it sounds like it allows you to drag and drop and resize the various different cards
and elements that make up your home assistant dashboards drag and drop was being developed by
the one and only zach barrett who's now also a full-time naboo casa employee so great work and
congratulations on that zach and we're going to expect to see lots of cool things from you more
awesome front end stuff and of course drag and drop if you're interested in having a peek at
potentially what drag and drop could look like within home assistant then you'll find a link to
zach's youtube page in the description below and there you'll find a video where he runs through an
early alpha build of drag and drop so go and check that out moving on then the second feature i'd
like to see added in 2022 is the ability to create groups using the user interface currently home
assistant groups are all created and written in yaml now if you're new to home assistant or maybe
you don't like using yaml then you're actually going to be missing out on a big feature here and
groups are very useful and have a lot of power to them the actual code writing them isn't too
difficult and there's plenty of guides for them but again if you're not using these you're missing
out on a big feature here my idea for this feature would be to kind of take what we already have for
areas and just modify that up a bit for groups so as an example you'd head into your configuration
and then under devices and services you'd see that you've got integrations devices entities
groups and areas so we'd get this new tab at the top for groups and inside of that we'd have all
the different groups that we've created and in the bottom right you'd have a little button for
creating new groups you could then just edit and view any of these bits of information
you can combine your entities into new groups and so on so forth basically just what we have for
areas but groups another aspect of it that would be very useful and helpful is the ability to just
edit and modify these groups so if for example say you remove a device or you've got some straggler
entities these groups could show you the entities that are missing and you can just easily remove
them again without having to touch the ammo but i guess it's down to you know user preference you
can still edit it in the old groups method using yaml but this would just be a nice user-friendly
method i guess and on to the third feature so the third feature i'd like to see added is more
account controls so with update 2021.12 we did get a little bit more in the sense of account control
in that update we've got the ability to create user accounts that can only log in and access
our home assistant if they're currently on the same network that home assistant's running on
now this is a nice step forward and it's great to see more account things being added
but i would like to see this expanded on a little bit more so some of the ideas i had to expand
on this would be something like the ability to create an account that's got a set expiration or
a set timeout on it this might be useful if maybe you're running an airbnb or something like that
where you want to be able to lock the user account from maybe an automation or a service call
and the idea behind the timeouts would be kind of like a parental control thing so maybe you could
have the ability to lock or stop an account using various items or devices at a set time maybe you
want to stop the kids from using the tv or turning on their tablets at a set time and maybe parental
controls and account settings isn't something that you're interested in but this one might
so my fourth feature is an improved blueprints exchange currently when you're searching for
blueprints it takes you to the blueprints exchange which is external from your home assistant and it
takes you to the home assistant forum from here you can browse the various different blueprints
that people have uploaded and if you want to you can import them directly into your home assistant
and this works well and it's made a lot better by the inclusion of the my home assistant buttons
so you can just click that import blueprint button and it will take it directly into your
home assistant to me it just feels a little bit clunky and it could just do with the lick of paint
now it would also be cool if you could actually browse and search for those blueprints within home
assistant and just have it all native rather than having to leave and come back i don't know how
feasible that is but i think it'd be cool and on to the last feature then so if you've been
watching this thinking none of those features are practical and maybe they're all a bit out there
wait till you hear this one so my fifth and final feature would be the ability to have shared home
assistant instances so what i mean by this is you could share your home assistant entirely
or sections of home assistant with another nabucassa user the obvious way of giving
someone access to your home assistant would be to provide them with the url they need to access it
as well as a username and password but my idea here with shared instances would allow you if
you've got an active navicaster subscription and another person also has one you could link the two
instances together so you could optionally choose what entities what automations basically whatever
parts of home assistant you want to share with the other person so in our example here we've got a
new column in our devices for instance so anything in that instance that's local is currently in our
home assistant and i can see there's another instance there for dad's home assistant so
this in this case my dad will have shared his home assistant instance with me
and the idea behind this would be you could configure and control those devices or scripts or
automations or again any part of home assistant that they choose to share with you and you could
then configure it for them so kind of like it's a big giant home assistant with all these
little home assistant nodes connected but what i'm actually going to do here is just tack on another
feature because i think this one was a bit poorly explained if you did happen to get what i'm trying
to say then yeah let me know in the comments that you got what i was going for okay so fifth feature
take two so the idea and concept for this one is much easier to understand but basically it would
be a theme store so this could be a place where you could click in home assistant and you could
do a search for some keywords again kind of like i said with the blueprint exchange but you could
do a search for a particular theme and you could just view them in-home assistant without having to
leave and then you could just apply them directly to home assistant and these themes would again all
be users submitted and user created but i think it would just be a nice touch and it would give
a bit of differentiation and it's a lot easier for people to set up and install and there we go
that's been a quick look at five new features that i'd like to see added to home assistant in 2022
and i know some of those are a bit far-fetched and would require a lot of work but you know
we've got those home assistant guys they know what they're doing again if you've got any cool ideas
or features that you'd like to see added then let me know what they are in the comments below
if you have enjoyed this video don't forget to drop me a like and if you're not already
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any future video that i do as always a massive thank you to these awesome dudes
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turn helps me to create content like this then you'll find a link to my patreon in
the description below also a massive thanks to frank whose image i may or may not have borrowed
for this video backdrop thank you for watching and i'll catch you in the next one cheers you