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Hey everyone,
We’re 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)
What’s next? Well, this is still a work in progress. We’ve 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 don’t 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 “primary views” and “menu views”. With the new desktop design, all of your views will be accessible from a side menu. That menu will list first the “primary views” and then the “secondary views”. 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.
We’ll 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). We’ll 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 | “Preview as” 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 won’t 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 browser’s back button and the breadcrumbs. |
| Font size changes (via app settings) lead to layout issues | Generally, we recommend using the browser’s 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!
It looks like format rules don't affect the tab names. Consider honoring at least any applicable format rule's "Uppercase" setting, as well as maybe others (e.g., Text color, Underline, Strikethrough). Some might have to remain ineligible (e.g., Text size).
Format rule:
App UI:
Data source:
Tabs also don't support image columns designated as a table's label column. Instead, another column's value appears, but I don't know how AppSheet determines which column. It might be the table's first non-hidden, non-image column.
And, both these issues (format rules; image values from label column) also apply to breadcrumbs.
Apologies for that confusion. When I say "prioritizing Desktop", I mean the issues that are on the main path to getting Desktop ready for GA. Table QuickEdit is not on that path because it is a separate Beta feature, as the UI shows:
I understand this distinction is subtle, but it is the current prioritization scheme. Of course, where possible we will try to fix bugs like the one @birikim reported, but the prioritization will vary based on each precise issue. We are balancing competing prioritizations the best we can week-over-week and month-over-month.
Here is another thing that may be improved: format rule not fully being applied in a drop-down list (with type Ref)
from the app editor interface, mobile type:
From the desktop interface:
Many thanks for your consideration!
And thanks for the great work!
To close the loop, this was fixed last summer, here is an example:
To explain this example, there are two tables, Offices and Site Leads, and each office references a lead. The orange format and icon are on the Offices table, to format the ref (via its presented label). The yellow format, icon and larger text are applied on the Site Leads table, to the name, when the name contains Lana.
In the new interface in April, some of the actions that previously worked correctly stopped working, in the old version they still work without problems.
App ID - Test application for demonstration:
7cbd7c2b-c5f5-47ed-a1ae-c37ad044f789
The problem occurs when calling an action from a third-party table
For clarity , a conditional scheme:
The essence of the actions is to add a new entry to the Print Task table from the Project table and further set parameters for printing via INPUT (set this row)
It probably makes no sense to describe in detail the structure of the tables and each action, because a test application has been prepared in which you can see everything.
Operation of actions in the new desktop mode:
When launching actions in the "Project" table from the "Report" table, some of the actions are not performed and the INPUT window does not open
Operation of actions in the old interface:
Everything works correctly in the old interface
Good afternoon @Derinko20 !
Of course, this topic is not related to printing options from the application, but I will allow myself to answer your question.
What you see in the video is the tip of the iceberg. This is only the implementation of the first step in the AppSheet.
Analyzing and testing various printing options from the APPSHEET, I could identify several printing concepts:
All of them require the use of additional services or software.
You can also use the built-in software of thermal transfer printers to print barcodes by sending only text information that is encoded into the barcode by the printer itself.
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As for the implementation in AppSheet, in this case it works as follows:
1. Tables - Printer || Templates/formats (e.g. A4) || Printing tasks
2. Setting up an action to add a print task to the Print Task table
3. Setting up an action to insert print parameters in the Print Task table using INPUT (number and printer selection)
4. Setting up a bot to monitor the addition and modification of records in the Print Task table
5. We send data from the App Sheet to an external printing system
This is a very conditional concept of necessary actions, in practice, of course, everything is much more complicated
