What the heck is going on with Form Views in Desktop Browsers?

What the heck is going on with Form Views in Desktop Browsers?

The screen is SO narrow and not responsive!

Frankly, if this is Material Design it looks absolutely terrible.

Is this ‘feature’ going to change back to what it was previously?

It should be truly responsive.

I think the original AppSheet designers had a much better eye for the UI.

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And a quick update on the UX changes … after discussion with @Thierry and @Adam, we’re going to take the UI changes and roll them back to where they were approx 2 days ago. At that stage, our free accounts all saw the changes but the paid accounts did not. We’ll take it back to that state while we process and try to address your feedback. This is why we do incremental rollouts — if we learn unexpected things, we should dial it back.
Probably any further changes after that will only happen in January.

@Adam will add an update here when there is a timeline for the deployment today.

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Agreed, this looks awful on a desktop browser.

Can this be configured back to the original design?

Also with you, it does look realy bad.

Austin
Participant V

This is how they have always looked on desktop? Since as long as I can remember which is like 16 months now.

this is how it loks in a form view

and this is in detail view a vrey narow look

Austin
Participant V

Yes they’ve always been that narrow. (Not at all disagreeing that they shouldn’t be larger and that the narrow is not terrible just stating that they’ve always been this way)

Something about your detail that is odd, its narrow across the bottom instead of spacing out down there which it normal does

Bahbus
Participant V

See Dev response in this thread:

I noted the same thing yesterday, see this post:

Thanks for linking that other post @Bahbus

look, how bad it looks now in dark team, with show columns and quick edit column …
if somebody could do something about it because dark team that most of customers like is useless in this case. it is so distracting narow and bad to look at.

I really want to get the desktop friendly version of detail/form view to entry and view data…
This looks horrific, just luckily the new code is not arriving to my accounts…

What I can do now is only like this stay away from new code… ?

I dont wanna catch it!

Problem is we would like to say this is sort of bugs, but Appsheet team may say this is new style…

End of story then.

It was exactly this time last year, I luckily made a visit to Appsheet office in Seattle, and had an opporunity to address issues of Appsheet (from my own prospective).

It was one of my wish list to address this detail/form view issue to get more user friendly when interacting from PC/browser.

Appsheet should stay No-Code, which I generally agree.

But we have Context(Host) expression ready.

Once App notice we are on browser rather than mobile device, then we could present the multiple column style of detail/form view to reduce the “dead space” and make access to data by user and data edit in much more efficient manner.

Hope this will happen!

FYG, this is materials for my presentation at that time. (I shared before in the community, so this is basically re-post.)

here is in dash view

terrible ux design for end user,

is there a soluton on the way or some changers to this.

No solution as it is new style and code.

Austin
Participant V

“Solution” is a large tall not large large, very big air quotes around solution

we know about that but in general it is totaly bad,

There is a thing we can control or can not…

Basically this is what I expected when I heard Google get Appsheet… The side effect (negative ones) are now spreading out. I wrote the blog last year about the concern over Google aquisition. I re-read my blog now, but unfortunately the concerns is now happening in real world.

(Sorry i wrote in my mother tongue, ask google to translate if you have interest)

Google translate seems to like capitalizing things or is that an actual part of how it was written?

Your blog has only become more of a reality in my opinion. Old support seemed to get past the initial debug questions much differently. The best way for me to describe it is used to be almost assumed that it was a real bug now it seems assumed to be user error. I would push back on there being less major bugs. We have only 16 months of experience with Appsheet and it might just be that we have more google time than pre but it seems to be increasing.
They also introduced the feature release notes and that has essentially died. All the development I’ve seen the past bit has been on the look of Appsheet without much functional changes. It seems like the feature request section is going silent and unnoticed from Appsheet. Example below has 70 votes, has been out there for a yr, and 0 post from an Appsheet member. There are plenty of other post that get lots of community traction but none from Appsheet themselves. How is anyone even supposed to believe they’re heard when something that is so obviously desired cant even get something? Everything about the new features or what’s currently being worked on seems to have gone quiet as far as the forum goes. The only way I seem to find out is they randomly get rolled out to my account, and I get frustrated cause I didn’t know they were coming. Office Hours are becoming less frequent it seems? I also don’t wanna go watch an hr long video to figure out what could be coming.
We seem to have gotten on a luxurious boat but it has no windows and the captain randomly comes to give us hints as to where we are going. Some of us have travelled so far on this boat that its getting dangerous to try and get off.

Thanks for reading it.

It could be possible “Google” got a A level score for English class at the school time. Also got A level for translation from English to other European languages. But they seems to get C - Level to translate from Japanse to English…

I agree what you wrote in your post, fully.

To this end, I believe what is truly needed is somewhere that displays the current deployed version(s) and the changelog over previous versions. I’m sure there is in internal tool for tracking all these changes no matter how small, so hopefully it would be something that wouldn’t be terribly hard to automate. Roll back a single change? Strike it out. It could be a simple window within the editor. It could be a dedicated webpage somewhere where that is just kept live linked to the actively deployed build. I don’t know. Maybe that level of transparency is too confusing for people. But I think it can’t hurt. Worst, it invites lots of extra questions. At best, some of those extra questions lead to improvements. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But again, only if it can be automated pretty heavily. I don’t want to suggest someone should dedicate extra time for it every single deployment.

Hi folks,
We have a number of internal threads discussing the various topics in this thread and other threads. Let me try to address briefly but transparently:

a) For the details view width, the motivation was to be consistent with the form view (which was already fixed width and centered) and render in some kind of sensible way across the wide variety of desktop screensizes. The full screen width prior mode had its own set of layout issues. However, clearly we did not anticipate some of the problems you have identified. We’ll confer and try to address asap start of next week. If we need to revert back to the old state, we’ll do that. The purpose of this platform is for you to build apps your users want, so if many of you don’t like a change, that steers us. The general direction @tsuji_koichi suggested feels like the right answer but it is non-trivial.

b) For our overall responsiveness on support and community, it is very deeply frustrating to us as it is to you. I have a long post drafted yesterday which I’m just re-reading before sending. For those of you who have been with AppSheet for a while, it may help explain parts of it. But the basic explanation really is that we have allowed ourselves to get distracted from our true mission which is to be a platform for you. That is our bad and recovering from that is our top priority.

My perspective continues to be what it has been for many years — we are all different parts of a single AppSheet team. Of late, the product part of the AppSheet team has been failing the community part of the AppSheet team. To fix this, I start with acknowledgment, understanding, and apology. And a commitment to mend. We are entering the last ten days of December but still I will try to have an open AMA webinar early next week, and we’ll do one again in early January.

whaty this again, it is soo bad.
what are they doing to this platform??? and why is this so bad now.

They are messing with something that nobody had a problem with, and they are making it to be realy bad.
I really don’t know is there some team or some person that seats all day thinking how to mess up this platform and interface. nobody nobody had a problem with look of the ux, but they are fixing it to be worst, not beter.
it is plain ugly, pitch black and confusing please if you can test this first ask us on some example app, what we all think, we (all the users of the platform) are using this platform we know what users want, not some dude over there.
please redirect those people to figure how to print document directly from the app, they will never solve it but at least they wont mess up UX of the platform, and make it so un a piling and ugly.

WHAT IS THIS


And a quick update on the UX changes … after discussion with @Thierry and @Adam, we’re going to take the UI changes and roll them back to where they were approx 2 days ago. At that stage, our free accounts all saw the changes but the paid accounts did not. We’ll take it back to that state while we process and try to address your feedback. This is why we do incremental rollouts — if we learn unexpected things, we should dial it back.
Probably any further changes after that will only happen in January.

@Adam will add an update here when there is a timeline for the deployment today.

Hi Praveen,

Thank you very much for detailed statement and I m glad to see our voices are reaching out to you and your team to make our platform better.
From my point of view, “UI” is far most important element to run such application among others. As it is quite easily noticiable by anyone who interact with the app. Just a app users (no app creator) will see and evaluate our app once they get onboard. So it is quite important how it LOOK like and visually appealing.

After google get to you and us, it is quite understandable that Google will steer the hundle to guide the company where we go. It is no-doubt that new features such as Apigee, Automation stuffs which is in pipeline will be adding fuel to appsheet to get more functional, but from my prospective as Appsheet creator, there are other functions and features which could be prioritilized rather than those new features. “UI” improvement is one of them.

New expression, New style of UI and new logic etc, those are immidiately affects to all the app creator, meaning those will get the interest swiftly. Such a basic new new features and function will also drive us, appsheet creator, to come up with new idea and usage which would be de-most important for majority of community members.

Yes, decision to draw the picture of the new feature road map is absolutely upto Appsheet team as platform operators, but I hope there should be determinting factors, such as how much majority of the app creator are awaited and in need. For instance, once Apigee stuffs are in full swing, I dont thing majority of app creators will start to use it. (dont take me wrong, I m not saying we dont need such a feature).

For instance, it looks tiny stuffs, but if we could display value of YES/No type column as arbitrary text value rather than Y/N, I would say 100% users would welcome that.

Appsheet is growing, naturally team is getting sizable, and team management should altered to fit with it, but i wish to hope the distance between App creators and your team member will get closer like we were so before Google. We can get knowledge, why this new feature is difficult and take time throughout the converasation with Appsheet folks, and there should be benefit to appsheet forks to get the direct feedback from the app users… Should be win/win relationship.

Off course, there is technical feasibilities and difficulties that should be taken as factors to decide which one will be prioritize or not.

Bring the subject back to UI stuffs. I dont think we are in a rush, although we need improvement in a first place, as it will broadly affect almost everything in appsheet. These days, the topics thrown into this community is largely UI related or related bug report etc, which make me frastrated to access to the community thread. (so i get lessers posts these days, as I honestly fed up)

I appreciate Appsheet approach which others do not take. New feature is ready, then deploy immediately rather than waiting for major release and version changes.
However, in terms of UI changes, I think we should take the normal development approach for this occassion. Just test the new UI under the test account, before deploying. I think we can get bunch of volunteer to be a tester and provide the useful feedback. Once the test goes well, then release major ones.

New UI come up, which makes old UI broken. People get complaining. Revert it back.
Push new UI, and repeat the same process. It is absolutely not a good idea and just killing time and effort of everyone, it could dangrously spoil all the effort made by Appsheet forks who are tirelessly work on new code to make the platform better.

To close, thanks again, and I m glad to be a member of Appsheet team!

is it posible to go back when show columns were centered not like this_
baceuuse it look also very bad

DTG
Observer

This is one of two major issues preventing me from going forward with an Appsheet project for my organization: lack of desktop awareness, and inability to easily print from my app without getting completely lost in workflows and table manipulation. Quite honestly, solving the first can solve the latter, if layout tools are made available so I can custom design a view, I can have users Ctrl+P to print. But I wouldn’t dare Ctrl+P the long, thin layout that is used now. But better yet extend those layout tools to a report creator.
I find it funny that I could do all of what I want to do in Access in 1998. 20+ years later no-code web-based databases seem to still be in the teething phase. Maybe make feature parity with Access a goal?

Bogdan_Stan
Participant II

I also don’t know why they don’t give too much attention to the dektop version of the form and detail view. There’s so much wasted space … This is the main reason i postpone the deployment of my apps… i cannot use this narrow view on desktop…

Are there any updates in this matter?

Also hoping for an update here

Are there any updates in Form Views for desktop browsers? (Computer/PC)

Nope.

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