A modern front-end for a new day
At this years eye-share User Conference in Oslo, Norway, I had the opportunity and privilege of finally showing what we’ve been secretly working on for a few years; Project “Flex”.
We’ve always been saying that we want to deliver the best user experience, and even though we’re very proud of our current front-end which has served us very well, it’s beginning to show some signs of age. It has some foundational technical limitations, both in terms of the technology it’s built on, and in terms of how expectations have changed since 2016 when it was new.
The main challenges of today’s front-end
- A fixed layout throughout the application with a list, document and details, is not sufficient for the design of tomorrow.
- A separate desktop and mobile client mean some features are not always present in both.
- An outdated framework that we cannot transition out of means we have to rewrite.
Assessing the risk
Rewriting the front-end is not something we’re doing willy nilly. We realize it comes with risk, rework and cost. However, we cannot be stuck in the past and need more flexibility for tomorrow.
With lots of experience, and success, in rewriting software, having done so when we delivered eye-share Workflow 2016, we are confident that we can do so again, leveraging newer and more robust technologies and tools on this more limited scale.
Reaping the rewards
Project “Flex” will give us a single front-end which works equally well on the desktop as on mobile, leveraging responsive design, meaning that if you order a customization, you can expect it to work on either kind of device.
We’re not reinventing the wheel, however. It is still a layered plugins-based application, and so you can expect us to handle your change requests in the same way as we always have.
Each page can have its own defined layout, and so we will be able to make more flexible designs such as what we have for the “Web Shop” in our Purchase module in other areas of the application as well.
Demo time
I showcased our alpha state software in a live demo at the end of my talk, and judging from the palpable silence when I was done, I like to think it gave many of you something to ponder. It was certainly a great joy to hear your feedback that being able expand documents into a full screen mode or pinning multiple documents beside each other will be useful features.
When is it coming out?
I’m sorry to say, we don’t have a release date to share just yet.
But you should know that after nearly 3 years of secretive development by a small team, we’re in the process of ramping up to full production mode. We have most foundational pieces in place, but eye-share Workflow is a very feature rich application so it will still take a bit of time for us to flesh everything out.
Suffice it to say, we’re very eager to get this into your hands as soon as possible!
