Calcapp Creator, our app designer, has been afflicted with two minor but annoying bugs for some time now. The problem was that we couldn’t consistently reproduce them, which made them much more challenging to fix.
Fortunately, we managed to fix both for this release. These fixes, along with several other improvements, make Calcapp Creator feel more polished and reliable.
Formula popup
When you edit formulas, we helpfully show you where you are in a particular function (first or second parameter to XLOOKUP?), along with concise documentation. This feature was introduced roughly two years ago.
At the same time, we introduced formula autocomplete, which shows you a list of suggestions for things like functions and fields you may be trying to reference.
It turned out that when both were displayed at the same time—the function information and the autocomplete popup—moving away from the formula editor would only dismiss the autocomplete popup, not the function information.
Sure, you could press a button to dismiss that information, but this was still annoying. What was more annoying for us was that it took a while to figure out that this only happened when both were showing at the same time.
This problem has now been fixed, making the app authoring experience much more polished. Finally.
Checking many items
You may not be aware, but you can speed up your workflow quite a bit by editing multiple fields, buttons and other elements at the same time. Just press the check mark next to all the items you want to edit, and the inspector will apply all changes you make to all the selected items.
(This feature even enables you to edit the formulas of multiple properties at the same time!)
The only problem was that this feature stopped working occasionally. You’d check multiple items and be rewarded with an empty inspector. Not good.
We encountered this problem on numerous occasions, but every time we got ready to track down the issue, everything worked just fine.
Then, a week or two later, we’d encounter the same problem again, realizing that the pesky bug still lingered.
It turned out that every time we tried to track down the issue, we started fresh with a newly loaded Calcapp Creator, which wasn’t very effective because the problem only manifested after you opened a new app.
With the problem being fully reproducible, we were finally able to fix the bug. Along with the popup fix mentioned above, we think this makes for a much more polished experience.
Additional polish improvements
Beyond the two main bug fixes, we’ve addressed several other issues that contribute to a more polished Creator experience:
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When selecting a screen from the inspector (such as the Target property of go back buttons or the new FirstScreen property of your app), the display could get garbled for long screen names. Fixed.
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We use your location for various things, especially when displaying prices when you make plan changes (we even translate the VAT term to 25 different languages). To do that, we subscribe to a service that tells us your country from your IP address. This service can fail intermittently, which makes Creator crash. We now recover from those failures more gracefully.
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We’ve modernized our embedding features by dropping Internet Explorer support. When embedding your apps in a web page, you can include a JavaScript library enabling your page to communicate with the app, realizing things such as auto-height. The embed tab now reflects this change, though existing apps using our Internet Explorer support will continue working for the time being.
While individually small, these improvements collectively make Calcapp Creator feel more reliable. The formula popup and multi-selection fixes in particular eliminate two of the most annoying workflow interruptions our users experienced.