New Feature: Translations

Ever since we’ve launched one of our biggest surprises has been the percentage of users that have come from outside the US. It’s been way higher than what we expected!

It’s been a blast to interact with customers all over the world and look down the list of countries where Knack apps are being used.

Of course, this also means a lot of requests for translations.

Even though you can use your own language for all the field and scene names, there are still plenty of words and phrases built in to the app that are stuck in English.

We’ve slowly been working on a translation system and today we’re launching an official setting that you can change per app. You can access this in your application settings:

We’re starting with a small list of languages that a few of our awesome Knack customers have helped us with:

• Danish
• German
• Portuguese
• Spanish

Update (April 2013): we’ve since added French, Italian, and Swedish!

These translations are definitely a work in progress. If you spot any English phrases that haven’t been translated, or see any translation that you think should be improved please get in touch.

Other Translations

We’re working on other languages but we don’t have any set ETA.

If you want to help expedite your language translations, we’ve created a form that can be created to help provide translations:

http://knackhq.knack.com/translations

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Happy New Year!!

Wow, what a year!

2013 saw Knack grow from a tiny launch to a fully matured product powering thousands of apps.

We added some major features last year, from new views like maps and calendars, new fields like equations, and advanced features like our API, scheduled tasks, and SEO indexing.

We have big plans for 2014 as well, like single sign-ons, translations, E-Commerce and more.

But most of all, we want to continue to serve you — our Knack customers.

It’s been such an honor to help so many of you build great apps that help you run your businesses and organizations.

We’re looking forward to doing more of the same for 2014!

-Brandon & Eric & the Knack team

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New Feature: Searchable Maps

We’re pleased to present a brand new view for the Knack interface: searchable maps!

This view is currently available for Knack users on the Pro plan or above, and is limited to North American addresses (international coming soon).

The map view works with Google Maps and is a great solution for store locators, dealer locators, contact searches, and more.

Map views can now be added for any object containing and address field, and include the following features:

• Search by zip-code or city
• Automatic directions link
• Custom pin colors
• Distance calculations
• Optional starting point
• Custom sizing for map and record list

Please let us know if you implement the map view or build your own searchable map locator or directory — we’d love to see it in action.

The Map view is in beta. As always, please get in touch with any suggestions or issues.

Demo

You can see an example online store locator listing all Dunkin Donuts locations:

https://www.knack.com/store-locator-online-database/

Drive-through locations are color-coded green.

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Knack and User Logins

One of Knack’s most popular features is user logins. You can require your users to log in in order to access your app. Different user roles can be created to define permissions and security.

The best part is you can connect views to the logged-in user, so each user can only see the records they are connected with.

The following are good examples of apps where logged-in users work with connected records:

• Track job hours in the Employee Hours app.
• Check out and return equipment in the Equipment Tracker app.
• View and complete assigned tasks in the Mobile Workforce app.

Job Portal App

Today we added a new example app that further highlights user logins and working with connected records: a Job Portal app.

This app works with two main user roles: employers and applicants. Each role can log in and manage their own records.

The employers can manage jobs they have available. The applicants can manage their employee profile and apply for available jobs. Each record added by a user is available for the other users to view.

We think think this is a great example of Knack user features. It works with multiple user roles and the entire database is populated directly by the users.

This app structure can be used for any scenario where you want two groups of users to interact with each other, like realtors and house-hunters, artist and collectors, or students and internships.

New User Tutorial

To make it easier to work with these features we’ve added a new tutorial:

Showing Records Connected to the Logged-in User

This tutorial exhaustively covers the different scenarios where you can connect your views to a logged-in user:Add views for the user to manage their own recordAdd views for records connected to the logged-in userAssign the logged-in user to a form submission

Add rules to filter records by the logged-in user

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New Feature – Map Details

We’ve added the ability to add Google maps to your detail views.

Note: this feature is available to our Pro customers and above who have geo-coding enabled.

Just edit any address field in your view and you’ll have options for showing the map and configuring the map size:

This will then show a Google map and link the address to the directions feature in the map:

If you are currently a Pro subscriber or above and want to add map details, please get in touch to request geo-location for your addresses.

Next up: a searchable map list!

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New Feature: Add Custom Multiple Choice Options

We’ve added a nice feature for multiple choice fields so users can add their own custom option on the fly.

You can set this option for any multiple choice field in your forms. Just click on the field to edit and check the option to “Allow users to add new options”:

This will then add a “Plus” icon next to the field where users can add their own options:

These options will be added to the field’s format, so they will be listed as an available option for any future forms.

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Custom Designs with Knack

One of the major features we like to show off with Knack is the flexibility you have to use CSS and jQuery to completely customize the design of your online database app.

Developers can use jQuery to respond to application events, like when a scene loads or when a form is submitted. Designers can use CSS to update colors, fonts, icons, and virtually every aspect of the app’s design.

We’ve seen some great use cases of Knack customers modifying their online databases –from minor design tweaks to complete overhauls– and we wanted to show a few examples:

South Padre Island

The official government site of South Padre Island needed a custom calendar solution that would allow them to receive event submissions from multiple sources, and display those events in a variety of different ways, all in a format that could easily be customized for multiple websites.

Here’s how their calendar looks on their main site, with custom icons, button styles, and colors, all easily added with CSS:

Visit: http://www.myspi.org/calendar/

TriStar Plastics

TriStar Plastics uses Knack for a searchable online database for their thousands of engineering materials they work with. These materials needed very precise search options that could be combined and navigated easily.

CSS and jQuery was used to create and position dynamic filters for searching and tabs for more easily viewing the results:

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New Feature: Calendar List

We’ve added a new option for our Calendar View to display your events in a list instead of a graphical calendar.

You can active the list option when editing a calendar view:

This will then display your events in a simple compact list:

The list option retains all the additional features of the calendar view, like custom colors, navigating through months and weeks, and having repeating entries.

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New Feature: Custom Colors

Now you can customize your online database apps with your own colors!

We added a section in the App Settings where you can add colors for the header, tabs and buttons, and link colors.

Here’s an example we used to create a “Knack” theme:

This updates the app to look like this:

We’ll be adding the ability to upload your own logo next.

Please share your app with us if you add a great color scheme, we’d love to see it in action!

Some notes:

• Any colors will be applied to both the hosted and published versions of your app.
• Let us know if any colors look terrible and we’ll take a look. It’s tough to test all the combinations!

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New Feature: Update Scene URLs

We’ve added the ability to modify the URL used by each scene when viewing your Knack app.

Knack builds a URL for each scene by including a special part for each scene, as well as some record identifiers when necessary.

The problem was that if you changed the name of the scene or object you could have a URL that seemed completely off.

You can now change the URL part that each scene uses by clicking “Rename Scene” in the right menu:

This will update the part of the URL for this scene. Any links from other menus and views will be automatically updated to use this new URL.

Notes:

• You’ll need to update any links manually that you’ve typed in or entered outside the app.
• Scene URLS need to be all lower case and can only contain alpha-numeric characters.

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