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 | 1. Follow-up actions (reopen, next view, click-on-save action) do not get triggered or executed properly; sometimes it is dependent of the app configuration and sometimes it is not 1. Delete and Done buttons are missing to delete new child row 1. Some performance issue when there are many Enum value buttons and format rule(s) |
| Navigation expressions: LINKTOROW(), LINKTOFORM(), etc | 1. When used in emails 1. When used to go to Dashboard Views |
| Format rules | 1. They don’t properly show up in a dropdown (for Enum, Ref, etc) 1. They don’t always show up in the group-by section 1. They don’t show up new headers |
| Detail View UI | - In some configurations, showing the wrong display names in a Detail tab - Requests to show the image label in the 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 | 1. Error message when action was successful 1. Export data based on what is visible to the user |
| 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!
I want NOW! 
