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Hey everyone,
Weโre excited to announce we are now previewing our new visual design for applications that are accessed on desktop browsers.
Currently, your AppSheet applications tend to follow mobile design patterns even when your users have large screens and these patterns can be confusing to desktop users. The new design lets these desktop users navigate their apps more easily and access information in context, and provides an efficient way to create and update records without losing context. App creators can also present more information by leveraging the larger screens but still keep it organized.
Here are some before and after images that better illustrate the design changes.
Legacy Design - Screenshot #1: Sifting through a collection of records grouped by City and State after selecting a State (Deck View)
Legacy Design - Screenshot #2: Looking at a specific record after selecting that record in the screen above (Detail View)
Legacy Design - Screenshot #3: Editing an existing record/Creating a new record (Form View)
New Design - Screenshot #1: Seeing your data in context (Deck View + Detail View)
New Design - Screenshot #2: Focusing on a specific record (Detail View)
New Design - Screenshot #3: Editing in place an existing record
New Design - Screenshot #4: Creating a new record (Form View)
Whatโs next? Well, this is still a work in progress. Weโve been gathering feedback from a number of design partners, including some of you in the AppSheet Community, and we know there is more to do before it can properly support all of your applications. At this stage, we feel that it would be good to let you play with the new design and to give you an opportunity to share your feedback - what you like, what doesn't work, what you think could use some improvements. This represents a significant change and your feedback will help us guide our next steps.
As this feature is in Preview, you may see visual changes in your apps as we work to improve the new desktop design in real-time. We don't recommend using the new desktop design in your production apps.
Thank you
The AppSheet Team
FAQ
How do I get access to this new desktop design?
We are currently slowly ramping this new experience over the next week or so, so you may not see this option in the editor immediately.
For each application, you can opt-in to use the new desktop design. You can toggle between the new and legacy desktop modes, as desired.
Follow these steps to enable the new design in your app:
- Open the app in the app editor
- Navigate to the UX > Options pane
- Enable the Desktop mode (Preview) option - see screenshot below
- Save the app in the Editor
All users of this application that access the app on a desktop browser will then see the new design after their next sync.
How do I configure the design of my app? I donโt see any new settings in the Editor!
There are minimal changes to the Editor for now. Mostly, the same settings are leveraged to specify the desktop and mobile designs. Let me give you an example.
Your apps have โprimary viewsโ and โmenu viewsโ. With the new desktop design, all of your views will be accessible from a side menu. That menu will list first the โprimary viewsโ and then the โsecondary viewsโ. In the future, we will adjust the configuration settings and in particular the language so that it makes sense for both mobile and desktop apps. For example, position values of "left most" and "right most" don't make sense for the new desktop design with its vertical menu structure.
Weโll be giving app creators more controls over some features that are currently set by default.
Is there some documentation or more information on what changed?
See Optimize the user experience using the new desktop design (Preview). Weโll update it over time.
Is there a list of functionalities that are known to not work with the new design?
Yes.
First, here is a list [as of July 31st] of (high-level) issues and requests that were reported to us and that still need fixes or assessments. Some of them are independent of the desktop mode, but we're still listing them here since people may want to know about them and so they don't need to report them unless it was reported for different app configurations :
| General theme | Issues |
| Form View |
|
| Navigation expressions: LINKTOROW(), LINKTOFORM(), etc |
|
| Format rules |
|
| Detail View UI |
- In some configurations, showing the wrong display names in a Detail tab - Edit-in-place in Dashboard view - Sync gets the app user out of Editing mode in a Detail View |
| General UI |
- Improvement requests on the subnav bar (e.g. larger text button, better responsiveness w.r.t. title, actions, text) - Clicking in grey area around onboarding view should not navigate the app in the background - Filtering on Dashboard - Tooltip for icon action buttons - Chart Views do not behave like other views |
| Localization of strings | Some strings are missing |
| CSV import/export |
|
| Other app functionalities |
- Missing Share, Feedback buttons - App Gallery behaving differently - Support of Amazon Cognito (missing account icon) - OCR not working on Desktop |
| Functionalities for app creators | โPreview asโ is not available for the desktop emulator |
Second, here is a list of some issues and feature requests that we know we are not going to tackle, at least for now.
| Supporting multiple navigation actions in a grouped action |
This is not something that we support. The team very intentionally did not want to support this. App creators should not rely on it and it wonโt work in desktop mode. |
| Multiple requests to improve the Table View UI |
We got requests to improve the Table View in general. The requests are valid, but that is out of scope for desktop mode. Changes we would be making would also impact the legacy UI and mobile apps. |
| LINKTOPARENTVIEW() not supported | For desktop users, there are better options to navigate back: the browserโs back button and the breadcrumbs. |
| Font size changes (via app settings) lead to layout issues | Generally, we recommend using the browserโs zoom which does a better job at resizing the app. |
| Background image |
See also Limitations and known issues.
How do I provide feedback?
Please share your feedback in this thread below this message!
Hi,
A number of reported issues against the desktop UI have been addressed in the October 27, 2022 release, including the following:
| Item | Description |
| Bug | For desktop UI (preview), default to vertical scrolling for inline card views in dashboard views (instead of horizontal scrolling). |
| Bug | For desktop UI (preview), fixed issue where button mode was not respected. |
| Bug | For desktop UI (preview), fixed CONTEXT() in virtual columns in form views. |
I LOVE this beyond words!
BUT (of course there's a "but") found this unexpected behaviour:
I have a column [Product] (not a key) which has a validation formula to avoid duplicates:
NOT(IN([_THIS], SELECT(Articles[Product], TRUE)))
This works in non-desktop mode, when I edit the field (or enter a new row) and enter a value that's already present it gives me an error message as expected.
BUT in desktop mode the error message is permanently displayed and impedes ANY changes to the column, including new adds, since the app gives the same error message for ANY value I enter, pre-existing or not.
Note that the product is also somehow displayed as a non-editable input field in desktop mode.
I have a feeling this might be related to "Forms show incorrect values when computed from expressions"?
Hi @Arthur_Rallu !
Thank you for this amazing new feature.
For EnumList Dropdown field, in case of filtered list:
- Classic View: after selecting one record, the filter still remain and it's possible to select other filtered records. It's also possible select all the filtered records.
- New Desktop Mode: after selecting one record, the filter is removed and it's impossibile to select multiple filtered records. The only way is to re-apply everytime the filter for each record. The "Select All" option is disabled and is active only without filter.
Another thing (only a "nice to have", not a bug): the "clear" button is really close to "open" button. It's easy to misclick and clear all the selected records.
Thank you
Hi,
The following enhancement and issues reported against the desktop UI (preview) have been addressed in the November 9, 2022 release.
| Item | Description |
| Enhancement | For desktop UI (preview), there is now a button next to the "phone" and "tablet" emulator icons to launch the desktop emulator in a separate tab.
This enhancement will be rolled out gradually. |
| Bug | For desktop UI (preview), fixed bug where the wrong actions were sometimes shown in the sub navigation. |
| Bug | For desktop UI (preview), expanding detail views wouldn't always work properly. When users returned to dashboard views through the breadcrumb interface, sometimes detail panes would be empty. This behavior should now be fixed. |
| Bug | For desktop UI (preview), groupBy views for the last groupBy column instead of showing them in the drill-down tree. |
| Bug | For desktop UI (preview), fixed inconsistencies with filtering in dashboards. |
Thank you,
Liz
I think a new bug arised after last update:
If you from dashboard enlarge/open a table view with groups after first having opened a group, you will not see the rows/data in the other groups. They do show as groups to the left with sum/total etc., but when clicking on them you just get an empty window with no rows... (the sum indicates of course that there should be rows there....)
