The past couple of months have undoubtedly been a difficult time for the world, with almost every industry being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic (read more about our response here and here). Yet we’ve still been working hard to ship new features in JourneyApps — here are the latest updates:
New IDE Update: Private Beta In Progress, Launch Coming Soon 🚀
We have been running a private beta of our new IDE, called OXIDE, with select customers — and have been delighted by the customer feedback:
- “The live co-editing in OXIDE takes pair programming to a whole new level.”
- “I don’t need any more browser tabs than just the OXIDE tab. It’s a beautiful thing.”
- “Drag-and-drop management of assets is just too easy.”
Stay tuned for the OXIDE launch announcement!
Photos Got A Major Upgrade
We have reworked how app users can interact with photos and how they are displayed in apps. Both the capture-photo and display-photo components are used extensively throughout apps, and we’ve made various improvements:
- App users can now download photos from the app to use them in documents or other applications. This has been one of our most frequently asked-for features. On desktop, you are prompted to select a location to save the photo, and on mobile, the photo is saved to the camera roll.
- We have updated the photo capturing UI to be more intuitive and space-efficient. The buttons to activate the camera or open the photo gallery are more prominent. Furthermore, photos are displayed as thumbnails, with intuitive actions available on the thumbnails such as clearing the current photo, or taking a new photo.
- Finally, users can tap on a photo thumbnail to view the photo in full-screen mode, where they can zoom and pan to look at the image in more detail.
The new photo components are available in Version 4.74 (RC) of the JourneyApps Runtime.
Next up for the photo component is the ability to take multiple photos in rapid succession, and adding annotations to photos (watch this space!). As always, head over to our public roadmap and let us know what you’d like to see next.
Create Multiple Landing Views
You asked, we listened! Developers have asked for the ability to show users the most relevant information when they open their apps, based on their user role. Up till now, this required workarounds and show-if visibility logic — which took too much time and effort to implement.
In response, we’ve released the ability for developers to link from the init() function on the main view of their apps. The result is that developers can create dedicated “landing views” for each user role, and route app users to those views automatically. The outcome is a cleaner codebase, and higher developer productivity.
Making Working from Home Easier
Many people around the world are adapting to working from home, where productivity can sometimes be a challenge. Fortunately, there are many tools that can help make you more productive from home. I’d like to share some of the ways that JourneyApps can make working from home a breeze for app developers and end users.
GitHub Integration
During our highlights of 2019 update, we mentioned that developers can link their app code to a GitHub repository to allow for better team collaboration. This is unique to JourneyApps — no other mainstream app development platform on the market supports this. By taking advantage of GitHub’s collaboration ecosystem, your dev team can work on different branches and complete work using git best practices, including code reviews and methodologies like trunk-based development and git flow.
Live Co-editing
One of the stand-out features of OXIDE is live co-editing for developers working in a team — you can see what your collaborators are doing in real-time, just like Google Docs. Teams now working remotely are using the live co-editing in OXIDE to set up pair programming sessions with colleagues, increasing their productivity.
Build Collaboration Tools on the Web
In February, we announced that JourneyApps now supports running apps as web apps. This means that you can now run the same app on mobile, tablets, desktop and the web, all with a single codebase. Using the web is the easiest way to roll out new apps to keep your staff and customers more connected. For example, a quick win is to build a “daily standup” tool that ensures everyone in your remote team stays in touch with each other.
That’s it for now. I look forward to sharing more updates with you soon, as well as unveiling OXIDE. In the meantime, stay safe and healthy.
