Did you celebrate Pi Day on Monday? We celebrated by building this app to explore all 146 (!) types of pie listed on Wikipedia. And don’t worry, if you missed Pi Day this week, you can always celebrate it on 22 July (22/7 for those outside the States) — any excuse to eat more pie.
🍟 Compute profiles beta
Just how big is your data? Two weeks ago we let you know about our new memory indicator to help you track just how much memory you have left, but sometimes, you just need more memory! We get it!
So, we’re introducing compute profiles in Hex — a new way to control the compute power of your Hex projects. Starting today, you can opt into more memory and processing power, depending on the needs of your project.
During the compute profiles beta phase (roughly until mid-April), we’re excited to give you free access to all upgraded compute profiles. This means you can use these compute profiles during the beta phase at no charge:
- Medium (default): 8GB RAM & 1 CPU
- Large: Equivalent to 2x
Medium - Extra large: Equivalent to 4x
Medium
After the end of the beta phase, we’ll move to a usage-based model: projects using larger compute profiles will cost a little extra (only for the time that the compute profile is being used).
We’ll notify you well ahead of charging for any upgraded compute usage and will not charge you retroactively for your usage during the beta phase (that’d be a real jerk move).
🚀 Emoji everywhere
You didn’t really ask, but we delivered anyway.
Emoji comment reactions are here! Check it out next time you want to give someone some 🔥 feedback.
You can also now use :emoji: notation in Markdown cells to trigger an emoji picker❗
👩🏫 Show code in app
Remember when your tenth grade math teacher advised you to “show your work” when answering those algebra questions? Well now you can show your work in Hex too.
If you’ve got an app where you want to communicate how the output was created, you can show the code (aka the “source”) of any SQL or Code cell from the new “Element Display Options” in the App builder.
🧱 Databricks integration
We’re excited to announce our partnership with Databricks! As of last week you can configure new Delta Lake SQL connections right from Hex (and much more coming soon!). Read more about it on our blog.
🆕 hex.new
Need to create a new Hex project in a jiffy? Just type in hex.new in your browser and you’re off to the races.
🏃♂️ New zero state
The Hex “zero state”, or what you see when you first create a new project, has gained some functionality. In addition to starting with a SQL or Code cell, you can now easily upload a CSV or add a new data connection right from the blank project.
It’ll even auto-run any CSVs you upload!
🔀 Re-orderable statuses
Internally, we’ve been using statuses to track the lifecycle of a project: from draft, to production, to archived. But it bothered us that the drop down for statuses didn’t match this order, so we made them re-orderable!
If you’re a Hex admin, head to the Admin panel to reorder your statuses. We also added some descriptions so you can help your team understand the right way to use statuses (and categories too).
Other improvements
- The
foliumpackage is now supported, unlocking many mapmaking workflows - Using the homepage search box will now search all projects, not just your recently used ones.
- Embedded cells now resize their contents to better fit iframe dimensions.
Bugs squashed
- We fixed a bug where
rawcells in uploaded .ipynbs were being imported as code, often causing errors. Now they are imported as Markdown, which is much safer (there was a reason you marked it asraw, right?) - Single value cells with very long numbers no longer overflow their boundaries.
- Our ongoing quest to banish scrollbars continues— you’ll never see them on a slider input parameter again.
- Clicking on a comment in an email notification will now take you right to that comment.