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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!
@Arthur_Rallu wrote:How do I get access to this new desktop design?
I still do not seem to have the new feature available. I have been trying to get the feature under UX - > Options - > General. Is the roll out process still in progress or am I missing something obvious? I am trying it on AppSheet Starter plan.
Would appreciate any indicators- whether still being rolled out or am I missing something obvious such as a setting?
Please also have a look at below points :
1. Enum search : can't search by label name, it forces to search by ID (impossible to search) ?
2. This Description column is Long Text data type, but the size of the text box it not as big accordingly
3. The Related Ref table type font is too big, it's even bigger than the show / section header
I submitted a feature request, but since the request is solely due to this new feature, might as well also comment it here as this may be a good feedback for the new Desktop view as well.
Conditional Show() column Category
@JPAlpano wrote:This request is to allow expressions when choosing Show() columns category.
This would allows us to switch the category based on conditions.What I have in mind:
Use Case:
With the new Desktop View, there will be times that we will need sections to switch between Section_Header and Page_Header depending on the views.With this feature, it will allows us to do conditions similar to below:
IF(
CONTEXT("ViewType")="Form",
"Page_Header",
"Section_Header"
)
Another observation.
When we click Edit from the Detail View in Desktop mode, ...
... instead of opening the form, it will simply transform the detail view into quick-edit columns (for columns that are editable).
This can be troublesome if the way you customized and reordered column in the form, is different from the way you customized and reordered them in the detail view.
Just sharing...
Upon saving a referenced row in a form, the referenced value doesn't show in the referenced column (in the main form). I also have a formula for the Deal Name in the first form, that gets it's values from the sub / referenced form. This formula doesn't compute correctly in the new desktop view. (It is a concatenation of three values).
