Hello guys, I'm very proud to announce that Records 1.1 for Mac, this massive update will be finally available today!
Records is a full-featured and powerful personal database app for the Mac. Efficiently collect and organize any kind of information, from your movies to your customer invoices in this easy-to-use database creation and management tool.
What's new in Records 1.1
• New 30+ templates ready to use
• New Table view to display, edit and sort data in a single view
• New Ascending and descending data sorting
• New Star rating field
• New CSV/TSV data import and export
• New portrait and landscape print paper orientations
• New German, Italian and Japanese localizations
• New Force Touch and Haptic Feedback support
• New User Interface design inspired by OS X 10.11 El Capitan
• Fixed an issue where the application crashes when the user is searching using special characters
• Fixed an issue where the List editor does not save correctly the new value for the selected list or item
• Various improvements and performance enhancements
@andreagelati It's clear that a lot of thinking and care have gone into the look and feel 1.1. Thank you for your efforts! I wonder if you would agree with me that the best use case for this would be one in which a user is building the database from scratch within Records.
I ask because I noticed today that while everything is quite beautiful, the choices you've made with templates and UI could leave those who are trying to bring existing data into the app a little frustrated.
For example, I noticed that one of the basic templates was a wine list, so I grabbed a frame of wine data that I happened to have (the WineKMC.csv from the Data Smart book by @john4man (found at http://media.wiley.com/product_a...) and did an import. I quickly noticed that all of the new field labels were stacked up together in the Canvas view, and that in the Table view, all the new columns had been added to the right of the existing ones. This created some column duplication, since both the template and the import had at least one shared field ($varietal).
At that point, I thought to myself, "What if I try importing into whatever the basic template is," since a reasonable response would be to suggest that. Took me a while to figure out how to do that, since the tab ("form") procedure you've made for working within a dbase appeared at first to be a way to do that - but all that happened on a second import was to add it all over again to the main tab/form.
After some spinning-pinwheel issues, I was able to restart with a new Blank template and create a database just from the WineKMC table. It populated the fields, but then because very halting and slow, with lots of spinning pinwheel. Seems excessive for 5kb file. After 10 minutes, I have to force quit.
I've been writing this up in real time as I tried your app. It's clear that you have a strong point of view for design, and I think a lot of the pieces for an interesting consumer/household product are here. But the difficulty of doing basic things has not left me with a great impression of it as an experience or tool. If your point of view extends into UI and functionality, then I think a likely place to build toward success would be better documentation or on-boarding. Best of luck as you continue your work!
@daviddlacroix Hey David thanks for the kind words about Records 1.1. The CSV import will be improved and expanded in upcoming updates introducing the behaviour you are expecting for like map CSV rows/fields into existing fields. About the spinning issue, is something we are working to fix.