This round of updates is entirely focused around improving your quality of life while you work in Hex.
Apps now run faster, filter cells are easier to use, and you can drag 'n' drop cells in Notebook view. You can even copy and paste cells between projects.
🏎️ App first run acceleration
Folks, now that you have heard my story,
Say, boy, hand me over another shot of that booze;
If anyone should ask you,
Tell 'em I've got those Hex project First Run Blues.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcXSbCXxGzw
Previously, when you loaded a published app, you might have experienced what we’ve come to call "the first run blues": even though an app’s cached view loads instantly, changing an input parameter for the first time triggers a really slow run.
Basically, Hex apps need to do an entire top-to-bottom run just once. After that complete run, everything feels snappy as the reactive execution engine determines which cells to run and which to leave untouched.
Today, we’ve cured these first run blues— not with a shot of booze, but with "app run acceleration". This enables a new option for your apps to "pre-run on page load" – basically kicking that first run off in the background, to shorten the time for first user interaction.
The end result is snappier-feeling, faster-to-interact-with Hex apps for your users.
This feature is available for workspaces on the Team plan and above.
🐲 Cell Drag ‘n’ Drop
You can now drag ‘n’ drop cells in projects to reorder your logic.
Every cell has a little handle near the title that you can grab to start dragging. When you’ve dragged it to a good new home, move your pointer between cells until you see the "Move cell" bar appear between them— and drop!
🌪️ In-app filters
We’ve made some great updates to Filter cells. The biggest change is that Filters can now be exposed to end users of published apps, just like input parameters.
As an author, you can allow users to edit the entire filter configuration (eg: which columns are filtered and what kind of condition is applied), or limit them to only edit the filter values, as shown in this clip:
You’ll also notice that these filters have dropdowns of options, not blank text boxes! We now pick up values from the underlying columns and present them for selection.
Plus, filter drag ‘n’ drop 😎. Why let entire cells have all the fun? You can now drag and drop conditions around within filter cells to easily reorganize complex logic.
✂️ Cross-project copy & paste
The tried and true cmd+C → cmd+V copy and paste workflow has a new powerup: Cells can be copied and pasted between projects.
This works, well, exactly like you’d expect it to work: Copy some cells in one project, paste them into another, bim bam boom, you’re done.
The trusty old cmd+c shortcut will copy any cells you have selected in command mode, but you can also use the ··· menu on any cell to copy all upstream, downstream, or any connected cells. This makes it really easy to move complex logic between projects!
Other improvements
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We’ve added support for connecting to Redshift via SSL.
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You can choose to disable the datatype icons on Table Display columns, leaving more room for the column name.
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Changes to chart configuration are now "debounced", meaning they wait a couple milliseconds to see if you’re going to make another change before they start re-running the chart.
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We fixed a bug that caused chart cells to error on null dates.
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We’ve improved our handling of messy data in map cells, letting you plot data without having to remove Nones or cast strings to numbers.