Microsoft Flow enables you to glue your apps together with thousands of
services, like Excel or Slack, in the same vein as Zapier. It needs a
so-called JSON schema to work, though, which are tedious to write. Calcapp
Creator can now generate them for you.
Calcapp now supports paid plans and we are ending our beta program. To ensure
that your apps continue working, upgrade them to a paid plan before May 14.
This post walks you through the steps you need to take to upgrade your apps.
Private apps require your users to sign in before gaining access to your app
and require you to define who those users are. User tags determine which users
can sign into a particular app. Use the USERHASTAG formula function to
customize your app based on the tags of a signed-in user.
The new Statistics window uses graphs to shine a light on your app's
performance, in terms of app launches, sent reports and signed-in users, with
a customizable date range. Use it to compare an app against others in your
account or to compare your usage to your app's plan limits.
The Manage apps window now categorizes apps by their plans. It also allows you
to sort apps by their modification time, which is great if you store many
backup copies of your apps. Duplicating an app always puts the copy on the
Free plan.
E-mail report buttons now support setting the Reply-To, carbon copy and blind
carbon copy addresses as well as the attachment file name. Buttons for
downloaded reports now support setting the file name of the report. Finally,
we now support Zoho Flow in addition to Zapier and Microsoft Flow.
You can now change your password using a new account settings box. If you have
a system-generated password, you will be asked to change it the next time you
sign in. Finally, you can now reset your password.
You can now insert your own images in text boxes. They can either be centered
or float to the right or to the left of the text. A slider lets you adjust the
image width. Images work offline and are responsive, meaning that they work
well on any screen.
Use your own logo with your app to raise awareness of your brand. The logo is
displayed on the loading screen and on home screens your app has been added
to.
You can now use 26 new fonts when formatting text in text boxes, including
serif, sans-serif, monospace and playful display fonts. Custom fonts work even
when your app runs offline.
Calcapp now supports text alignment, underlined and strikethrough text and
different font sizes. You can also upload your own images and make use of 26
available fonts.
Import spreadsheet data directly for use with drop-down fields. Paste the data
from your table into our app to automatically generate Calcapp formulas.
Values of drop-down fields can now be edited as text. This feature makes it
possible to paste values from a spreadsheet all at once. It also enables more
efficient keyboard editing.
You can now customize the loading screen, also known as the splash screen.
Change the colors or hide the logo, the progress indicator or both. You can
also fully disable the loading screen, which is useful for apps embedded in
web sites.
You can now set base colors for your entire app through the start screen.
These colors affect not just your panels but also the loading screen. We have
also added a theme selector with five pre-defined color themes to allow you to
more easily experiment with colors.
Calcapp now supports three new text-processing functions, enabling you to
determine if text matches a certain pattern and to extract and replace text,
also using patterns. The three functions use so-called regular expressions.
The new CHOOSE function can be used as a compact, fast alternative to IF in
some situations. Use it together with the Index property of drop-down fields
to quickly return data matching a value selected by your user.
The new Index property of drop-down fields returns the numeric position of the
selected value and the Size property returns the number of values. Index is
designed to work well with the new CHOOSE formula function.
Calcapp now supports 79 languages and 147 language variants, enabling numbers,
dates and times to be formatted correctly. We have translations for app text
provided by Calcapp in 30 languages. Five languages have been translated by
human translators and the rest using machine-translation.
Use the new zoom level feature to make apps appear larger or smaller.
Associate a formula with the zoom level property to give your users control
over the size with, say, a slider or a switch field. Be sure to make these
fields persistent so the zoom level is remembered.
New properties enable you to set validation messages, field units and labels
of groups, fields, buttons and list panel options through formulas. This
feature enables your apps to more closely adapt to values entered by your
users.
Use four new functions to turn numbers into formatted text strings. Another
four functions convert numbers stored in text strings to pure numbers. All new
functions take the app language into account and support 147 language
variants.
A new start screen now greets you when starting Calcapp Creator. Use it to set
app-wide properties, like the app language and zoom level, and to change the
app name. There are also links to various resources.
New properties help you determine if your user is using an iPhone, an Android
device, a Windows PC, an iPad or a Mac. Use this feature to do things like
only showing a text box if the user is running an iPhone or changing app
colors based on the operating system.
You can now pad numbers with leading zeroes by setting a minimum number of
integer digits in the inspector. With a minimum number of four digits, 23 is
formatted as 0023. As a bonus, we show how to accomplish the same thing using
formulas and share some news regarding the venerable IF function.
Some countries use a 12-hour clock in everyday life, but a 24-hour clock in
some professions. Our new release enables you to use a language that normally
uses a 12-hour clock and still use a 24-hour clock for some time fields.
Assign subject lines to reports you send from apps with our new release. You
can determine the subject line using a formula, enabling you to include parts
of the report in the subject line itself. Use this feature in conjunction with
labels or rules in your e-mail client to automatically sort incoming reports.
The largest apps created with Calcapp can take can take a long time to load.
Today, we are speeding up the process considerably by compressing apps and PDF
reports before they are downloaded.
Sliders enable users to rapidly change the value of a number field within a
defined range. On mobile devices with cumbersome on-screen keypads, we expect
sliders to become the preferred way of experimenting with numeric inputs.
Steppers enable users to quickly increase or decrease numbers using dedicated
buttons, displayed next to the value. A variety of properties are available
for customizing steppers, including minimum and maximum values.
The new formula functions TONUMBER, TOLOGICAL and TOTEXT make it easy to
convert values to numbers, logical values and text strings, respectively.
Converting numbers stored as text to true numbers was previously impossible if
the number had a fractional part.
The tour template shows off many of Calcapp's features and has been completely
rewritten. The new tour demonstrates steppers, sliders, number formatting,
date calculations, cross-references and more. There's even a color selector
for the background color.
Remove the navigation bar from shared apps that have only one panel simply by
ensuring that you don't type a panel title. This change especially benefits
apps embedded in other web sites.
The Share app button now reads Update app if your app has been shared. Changes
you make to an app never go live for your users until you give the go-ahead by
pressing the button.
Calcapp now supports inserting links to web addresses, e-mail addresses and
phone numbers. Linking to a phone number enables users on cell phones to place
calls directly from an app. E-mail links cause a user's e-mail client to
appear, with the recipients, subject line and message body you specify.
Calcapp now supports formatted text in text boxes. Use bold, italic, quotes,
links, various headings and bulleted and numbered lists. All features are
keyboard-accessible for a smooth typing experience.
Reports can now be opened directly from an app, instead of having them
e-mailed. Use the new feature on its own, or use it as a preview feature your
users can use to check reports before sending them.
Colors can be selected using formulas that take into account values entered by
your users. You can use this feature to create field validation that really
stands out or to enable your users to select their preferred color scheme.
Give your apps a custom color scheme by setting only a few base colors and
Calcapp will figure out the rest. You can also set colors individually for
precise control.
The new color picker allows you to select the colors used in your app. You can
select colors either from a palette with colors that work well together or any
color by selecting a hue, saturation and brightness. It also supports entering
named colors and colors from the color models RGB, HSL and HSB (HSV).
Our next release enables you to remove panels without also removing the panels
that follow them. As a result, you can now do things like removing the first
panel of an app without touching the rest of the app.
Use our new copy and paste feature to copy fields and other items from one
panel to another or to copy entire panels. This is a great way to copy data
from one app to another.
The new Panels sidebar allows you to quickly move to individual panels. You
can also reorganize panels by dragging and dropping them. For better control
of your panel structure, copy and paste panels instead.
Our next release will allow you to insert panels anywhere in your app. You
will also be able to copy and paste panels and fields and other items. A new
sidebar will give you an overview of your panels and enable you to reorder
them.
You can now reference fields from other panels by clicking on them when you're
editing a formula. You can also reference buttons and the other items that
make up an app from your formulas by clicking on them.
Fields, buttons, calculation panel groups, text boxes, list panel options and
panels now offer a variety of calculated properties you can use to make your
apps more dynamic. This post offers the complete list.
Use formulas to hide and validate fields, make buttons grayed-out, determine
the recipients of reports and more through calculated properties. These
formulas are evaluated when your app is run and make it possible to build far
more dynamic, complex apps.
Use cross-references to refer to other panels with our next release, enabling
you to build truly large, inter-connected apps. This update also lays the
groundwork for calculated properties, which are coming soon.
Use data validation to flag invalid values with our next release. Specify
allowable intervals for number fields to determine validity. A later release
will allow you to use formulas to determine if a field is valid or not.
Customize the sender of reports that are e-mailed from your apps with our next
release. Soon, you will also be able to determine the sender using a formula.
Access the formatted values of fields from formulas and prevent persistent
fields from being reset with our upcoming release. Also, apps will look better
on desktops and on tablets and the app creation experience will be improved.
Starting with our next release, fields will be given names based on the
captions you type for them at all times. This makes formulas easier to read.
You can still assign names manually.
Our November update will enable text fields to feature multiple lines. That may
not seem all that significant, but has some interesting implications which we’ll
explore in this post.
We’re hard at work on a major update, one that will enable cross-references
between panels, allowing one panel to reference fields on another panel. That
work entails making major changes to how Calcapp works under the hood. As a
result, that work won’t be ready for our November update.
Support for sending data collected by an app through e-mail
or directly to a server you run was introduced in our
October update. Based on feedback from you, we have
tweaked some aspects and added a number of options. These features have been
available since the beginning of November, meaning that you can use them
straight away.
Being able to send data from the apps you build has been one of the most
requested features since we launched the beta. Today, we’re happy to announce
that this feature will be part of our October update.
Our October update will enable you to add buttons to your apps that reset all
fields of the current calculation panel to their initial values. Having the
ability to reset fields enables your users to easily experiment with various
values.
Our October release improves Calcapp Creator’s support for keyboard shortcuts.
We have tried to focus on common-sense shortcuts that will make using the
product easier for all users. For instance, to navigate between fields, press
the up and down buttons on your keyboard. To move from editing the caption of a
field to editing its formula, simply press Enter – and then press Enter to move
back to the field. Move to the panel preceding the panel you’re currently
editing by pressing Ctrl-Left and to the panel following the current panel by
pressing Ctrl-Right. There are also shortcuts for creating new items, deleting
and moving them and for quickly moving to the inspector and back again.
We’re getting ready to release our October update. The headline feature is
reporting, which in practice means support for adding buttons to your apps that
send the data your users enter. We’ll have more to say about this feature in a
future blog post, but we have also taken the time to improve smaller aspects of
Calcapp Creator. This post is about the formula bar.
If you have spent any length of time developing apps with Calcapp, you have
likely found yourself having to include the same formula fragments in many
different formulas. If you need to convert an input number to a different unit
before using the converted number in three different formulas, you need to
include the conversion logic three times.
Our upcoming release has two major features, the first of which we wrote about
yesterday: the ability to share apps with others. The other
notable feature is that shared apps work even when you don’t have access to the
Internet, like on airplanes or in rural areas with poor cellular coverage.
Offline support has consistently been one of the most popular requests from our
users and we’re happy we’re now able to provide it.
We’re finally at a point where we can share details about the major feature
we’re working on: app sharing. Soon, you will be able to easily
share apps through e-mail, social media and through your own web site (by
embedding your app into your site). You will be able to reach a shared app
directly from a bookmark or from your phone’s home screen. Also, shared apps
work when you’re offline.
Our upcoming release will feature 244 functions, support for
formatting numbers and a function
browser. Amid all the major new feature additions, minor
features can easily be missed. One of these is support for switches, which allow
users to easily toggle the value of a logical field.
In the current release, output numbers are always formatted with two decimal
places at most. Input numbers are left alone. This is obviously quite limiting,
and providing you with better control has been at the top of our to-do list for
a while now. To format numbers, you use the new inspector at the left-hand side
of the window:
Our upcoming release significantly improves error handling. (Examples of when
errors occur include when a number is divided by zero and when the wrong value
is passed as a function parameter.) The current Calcapp release handles errors
by failing silently, displaying nothing. That isn’t very helpful when you’re
struggling to get a formula to work correctly.
Numbers can not only be formatted as fractions and
percentages, but can also be formatted as dates and as
times, which enables your users to enter such data. You can use date and time
functions to manipulate the data entered by users and calculate
new dates and times to show to your users.
With our upcoming release of Calcapp Creator, editing formulas will become more
convenient. In particular, you will be able to insert the names of your fields
simply by clicking on them while editing formulas. When you’ve reached a spot in
your formula where it makes sense to enter the name of a field (such as after
you’ve typed “+” or the name of a function plus an opening parenthesis), your
fields will turn purple to indicate that you can click them to insert their
names at the caret position. If you’re used to spreadsheets, this should be
familiar.
With 244 functions, you need an easy way to find the function
you’re looking for and its documentation. To this end, we are introducing the
function browser. It will be available in the same sidebar housing the
inspector.
Our upcoming release will feature significantly expanded support for formula
functions. All in all, we will support 244 functions, ranging from text- and
date-manipulation functions to functions in statistics, finance, engineering and
trigonometry. If you’re used to a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel, the new
functions should be familiar. Here’s the complete list:
Calcapp enables you to create apps that might otherwise have been
created using a spreadsheet. Create apps yourself without
time-consuming and expensive custom software development.