2021 was a bumper year for JourneyApps. We partnered with RealWear to become the go-to platform for creating voice-controlled apps on their HMT and newly-released Navigator™ devices. We also shipped many game-changing features to give developers more control over their apps, and to extend apps with new styles. Here are the highlights:
Create Voice-Driven RealWear Apps
In 2021 we added support for RealWear HMT devices, with new voice command APIs. Customers can use JourneyApps to create custom extended reality (XR) hands-free workflow apps for RealWear, improving productivity and safety for employees in the field. JourneyApps brings unique new capabilities to the RealWear® ecosystem to create tailored apps for asset management, inspections, manufacturing, operator rounds, maintenance, guided work instructions and more — integrated with ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle.
Bonus sneak peek: Apps built on JourneyApps are 100% voice-controllable on RealWear devices by default, with no additional coding required from developers. Using these new automatic voice commands, customers will be able to get voice-controlled apps into production sooner — enabling significantly more ROI from their RealWear investment. Stay tuned for the official announcement of this major new capability in early 2022!
RealWear recently launched their newest device, the Navigator™ 500. Read more here about what this means for JourneyApps customers.
Improved Developer Collaboration
This year we released a number of new features that make it easier to work in a team — especially when building applications where numerous developers are involved. Some of these features include:
Testing Deployments and Git Improvements
We added “long-lived” testing deployments: You can choose such a testing deployment when you deploy to testing, no matter which git branch you may be working on.
Also, if you wish to deploy to a specific deployment from a specific branch, you can also set up OXIDE to do that.
Combined, these new updates allow you to better use git workflows. Each developer in your team can set up a long-lived testing deployment, seed it with the relevant testing data, and use that for development and testing.
Other Related Features:
- Merge conflict resolution: OXIDE now detects merge conflicts automatically and goes into a merge conflict mode so that you can quickly resolve all the conflicts in your app.
- Pull changes: OXIDE now shows a Pull Changes button when there are new commits ahead of your draft that you can pull.
- Merge branches: We added a new OXIDE action to merge branches from within the IDE.
Massive Upgrades to OXIDE Across the Board
We pride ourselves on being the best possible platform for developers to build custom apps. Therefore, we continue to add features that make building apps on JourneyApps a pleasure:
Better Ways to Manage, Debug, and Schedule CloudCode Tasks
We simplified the interface to define CloudCode schedules and introduced the ability to create deployment-based schedules that can be shared between CloudCode tasks. This means that you can run the same task on different schedules in different deployment environments, e.g. “run this every 5 minutes in Production, but every 3 hours in Staging”.
Additional CloudCode Features:
- Manage CloudCode task queues from OXIDE: You can review the CloudCode task queue depth and clear queues for tasks or deployments individually, or in bulk.
- Pause queues: Related to viewing and clearing CloudCode queues, we added the ability to pause the execution of the tasks themselves, preventing new task invocations from being run.
- CloudCode logs full-text searching: Developers can search through CloudCode task invocation logs. The feature is a full-text search on the contents of the logs and includes filters for log levels, date ranges, deployments, and specific tasks.
More Advanced Git support in OXIDE
In addition to the Git features aimed at improving developer collaboration mentioned above:
- Partial commits: Developers can select which changed files to commit in OXIDE. Changes not committed are automatically added to a new draft.
- Discard uncommitted changes: Developers can discard uncommitted changes they’ve made to individual files in OXIDE from the Changes panel. This makes the task of committing only the necessary changes to Git easier and faster.
- View source code for previous commits: With a simple right-click on the history panel, you can quickly view the source code for a previous commit, deploy, or revision.
Other Improvements:
- OXIDE find and replace: Developers can use find-and-replace in the Advanced Search dialog (in Advanced IDE mode) to quickly refactor code. This feature drastically cuts down on the time taken to refactor apps or make other code changes.
- ERD improvements: We added the ability to list relationships with names below the fields in the models, the ability to select models, and zoom to show the selected models as well as horizontal and vertical display modes, amongst other features.
- Deployment-based environment variables: Following security best practice, you can manage environment variables and secrets within one place from the Deployments tab.
Extend and Customize Your Apps More Deeply
We launched many new features this year that give you more control over the customization of your apps. We added styling control and default behavior with app config, the ability for rapid multiple photo capture, offline PDFs and PDF CLI, and app unit testing through TypeScript (TS) App Packages.
Additional Features Include:
- PDF Viewer improvements: We made extensive updates to the PDF Viewer, including the ability to preview full PDFs in the app, zooming in and out, as well as panning across pages.
- Trigger text-input dialogs from JS / TS: We introduced the ability to trigger a dialog with a text-input from the JavaScript / TypeScript using
journey.dialog.input({...}). - Barcode scanner improvements: We gave developers the ability to customize more aspects of the barcode scanner component. This includes the alignment of content, showing custom icons in the button that triggers the scanner, the button style, as well as custom helper text when the scanner is opened.
- Updated info table UI component: This can now contain custom icons with custom colors, and the color of the text in the table can also be customized.
And that’s it! Wishing you and your family a happy festive season and prosperous new year!
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