May 27, 2021

[willwitman]

Deployment Time: 08:45 PM PST

Features & Enhancements

Item	Description
Feature	Switching the rendering engine of the SNAPSHOT feature Currently SNAPSHOT expressions are shown as an image using a third party service called url2png. We are in the process of switching to an internal Google service to take the snapshot of the view. Deployed to 50% of free users.
Enhancement	A visual enhancement was made to sorted table columns to indicate when a table column is sorted. Deployed to all.

Bug Fixes

Item	Description
Bug	An issue was fixed that caused apps to get stuck in some cases on the sync screen. Deployed to all.
Bug	An issue was fixed where search on Card view was not working when going back and forth clicking on search results. Deployed to 100% of free users.

Rollout changes

Item	Rollout status
Action buttons now have descriptive tooltips.	New: Deployed to 50% of free users. Previous: Deployed to 33% of free users.
An issue was fixed where an unwanted vertical scroll bar was shown for inline tables.	New: 100% of free users and 33% of paid users. Previous: 100% of free users.
A new sort icon was added to table views to indicate the column by which the table is sorted.	New: Deployed to all. Previous: 100% of free users and 33% of paid users.

Preview announcements

The AppSheet Preview program lets app creators try out new app features that are not yet fully supported. Learn how to participate in the AppSheet preview program for app client features.

• No new preview features were released today.

What's currently available in the Preview program?

Item	Description
Feature	Google BigQuery data source For details, see the official announcement on the AppSheet Community.
Feature	Chart Editor App Creators can now make use of our new chart editor and the new and improved charts it can create. Learn more.
Feature	Filters in AppSheet applications App users can now filter items from a collection of records based on column values. The feature is available both on mobile devices and desktop computers. Learn more. In the Search box, you can now filter by label.

[Kirk_Masden]

I didn’t know there was a snapshot expression. Now I do:

help.appsheet.com

SNAPSHOT()

Screenshot a view and embed in documents.

[takuya_miyai]

@Kirk_Masden

Even Master Kirk has made new discoveries, so AppSheet is very deep.

[Kirk_Masden]

There are many, many things I have yet to learn, but thank you for your kind words.

By the way, I’m probably far away from you. I live in Kumamoto. But, I hope we have an opportunity to visit some day, especially after COVID-19 settles down.

[Kirk_Masden]

Will_Witman:

Action buttons now have descriptive tooltips.

Thank you for this announcement, @Will_Witman . As you may have noticed, there has been some discussion about this here:

April 19, 2021 Feature Release Notes

Yes thanks for giving me a head up, Kirk. yes, the tooltips for inline action is surely useful to guide app user well, but we do not need it for action button placed in prominently position, as it just repeats… Yeah, it could be also good ideat that we are able to guide user by using toolips, something like, "hey you, this action is not able to “undo” with tooltips. But currently the display name area is only the place to control such, unless we have another new independent settings for “tool…

The option to display tooltips is quite welcome. However, it would definitely be nice to be able to turn all tooltips off with a single setting change. I use my app everyday in my browser and the constant popping up of tooltip messages, many of which do not add any significant information, is mostly a distraction in my case. I hope you or someone else at AppSheet can tell use if you are considering a way of making the tooltips optional. And, as @tsuji_koichi points out, more control is needed to make it truly useful. Thanks for your consideration!

[Kirk_Masden]

I’ve been thinking about this some more and would like to add one more comment:

As I think has already been mentioned, “Display prominently” actions are problematic because the tooltip merely repeats the display name. “Display overlay” and “display inline” are fine, however. It would be nice to have a global way to turn them all on or off at once but at least they can be controlled one by one with the “Display name.” In my app, I have a lot a display inline actions so doing them one-by-one will be a bit tedious but doable, I think. The problem I can’t solve is the “Display prominently” actions. I think the only workable solution is to either remove tooltips from such actions or add a separate “Tooltips” spot to enter a “tip” that is different from the action name.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

@Arthur_Rallu

[Kirk_Masden]

At first, I had only noticed the effects of the new tooltips function in my browser. Today, however, I noticed some rather unhelpful effects in my phone.

First of all, I’d like to point out that, at least on my iPhone, I couldn’t get the tooltip to display without invoking the action. I tried long pressing but that doesn’t seem to work.

Instead of being able to use long press to get information BEFORE I invoke the action, the tooltip gets shown after the action is invoked as in the follow slowed-down gif:

I don’t think this is adding anything positive to the experience of my users.

The next example is what happens to actions in an action bar. Tapping on the thumbs up removes a record from the slice. After the removal, however, the action name is shown indefinitely, which is not positive in any way in my app:

I trust that tooltips will eventually become a very positive and welcome addition to the AppSheet platform. Thanks to all of you for working on it. Personally, however, I don’t think it’s ready to be deployed to all users. I recommend that you pull back on the deployment, spend some more time working out the bugs, and then redeploy.

Thanks for your consideration.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

I totally agree.

[Steve]

Kirk_Masden:

I don’t think this is adding anything positive to the experience of my users.

In fact, it’s confusing! “Wait, what did that say?”

@Arthur_Rallu

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Better to push this item into Preview or beta rather than pushing into production straight away… Everybody can wait patiently.

[Arthur_Rallu]

Thanks everyone for the feedback!
All of it is duly noted and we’ll let you know what we do next on this.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Just a single word to you " no rush, take your time"

[Simon_Krismer]

@Grant_Stead Do you think this may make the pdf generation work correctly for document creation of reports showing XY map data?

[Grant_Stead]

I’m doubtful it’ll function for filtered xy map views.
I’ll be running some tests on this next week though.
I’ll report back.

[Josephine]

Seems like we are still getting the ‘stuck on sync’ bug - are you sure it’s resolved for all users?

[Steve]

Please contact support@appsheet.com for help with this.

[Kirk_Masden]

Arthur_Rallu:

Thanks everyone for the feedback!
All of it is duly noted and we’ll let you know what we do next on this.

Thanks for your feedback, @Arthur_Rallu ! I realize that everything takes time but I wonder if you could give us an update on the status of your deliberations. For example, the issues that I identified in the gifs that I posted above continue to be a significant problem for me, especially on tables where the lingering image obscures whatever is on the line immediately below. If the issue is still being looked at, I think I’ll leave my apps as they are. If, on the other hand, the people who were working on this issue have moved on to other issues and it looks like it may take a long time for the matter to be revisited, I will need to go through most of my actions one-by-one to turn off the descriptive tooltips.

This brings me to another point: It would be very nice to have a single global on/off setting for tooltips. Tooltips can be particularly useful when the creator has many actions and wants to learn the name of the action by merely hovering over it. Of course, the exact action name, though very useful to the creator, is of no use to an ordinary user. So, one might want to flip a switch to turn tooltips on while working on the app but turn them off otherwise.

I understand that we need to be patient but I would really appreciate it if you could list what you are actually working on at the moment in regard to tooltips. Or, if tooltips are in a “good enough for now” state and we shouldn’t expect changes in the coming months, that would be good to know too.

[Kirk_Masden]

Kirk_Masden:

Tapping on the thumbs up removes a record from the slice. After the removal, however, the action name is shown indefinitely, which is not positive in any way in my app:

It looks like this has been fixed. Thanks!!

[Kirk_Masden]

Kirk_Masden:

It looks like this has been fixed.

Sorry but I didn’t check this out thoroughly enough. All seemed well on my computer but, since then, I realized that I still have the same problem on my iPhone:

In the image on the left, the “GOT IT” label is displayed from a previous tap, so it has no meaning in the current context. In the image on the right, the “GOT IT” label persists even on the screen to which the grouped action called “GOT IT” linked to.

I wonder if @Arthur_Rallu or someone else at AppSheet could give us a sense of what is being considered regarding tooltips on inline actions. I noticed today that the latest Feature Release Note indicates that tooltips have been fully deployed on overlay actions. For some reason, overlay actions work well: I’m able to preview the label on my iPhone (before invoking the action) and the label doesn’t persist afterwards. I wonder if we can expect inline actions to function the same way before too long. Thanks!