First let me start this off with some good news. The left-hand object bar has been further tweaked and reorganized. I previously commented that "process model / interface search results" being at the top of the list (as they are in 22.3 and lower) makes it harder to access the Smart Service Nodes we're after when that's what we're actually searching for. It looks like they listened! Yay!
But for the main point of this post: i've noticed that Grid Lines are now turned off by default and there is no way to undo this except by turning them on manually every single time you load a process model.
At first I was hoping this was a bug in my Community Edition instance, or some incomplete feature or temporary break. But other users are now posting screenshots from 22.4 versions around community and it seems like it may have been "intentional".
Hey Appian folks? This may have been intended to "look cleaner" or something - but to me, psychologically, it makes me think something hasn't loaded correctly. As far as I know, with as long as I've been looking at process models with grid lines, I anticipate this effect will last a long time.
I see they're still there. They're redesigned but I guess I don't have any major qualms with the newer, simplified grid lines (i'll paste an example below for everyone's reference). Can we just have them turned back on by default? Could it at least be given as an override in designer user-level preferences or something?
I know the product backlog is huge, lots of higher-priority stuff, etc. But I think this is something that wasn't necessary to change.
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Updating this to add (instead of cluttering community with another top-level post, though in this case i'm *sorely* tempted) - the 22.4 update's new Process Modeler nodes completely ruin the look of icons from Plug-in Smart Services. How did this pass testing?
Before:
Now:(note how bad the bottom-row node icons look...)
I'm so sorry you did this to yourself (assuming from past conversation, and how long I've been developing too, that this is what happened).
I give that a pass. Plenty of other things to develop first so I can at least stop looking at bad icons faster.
100% agree about Terminate. Absolutely true. I remembered there was a lot of stuff that I switch from default behavior absolutely EVERY TIME except once; somehow forgot about Terminate.
General idea is the default be what I change it to normally now, then I only go through effort once, instead of every time but once. Appian, just consult with folks doing Solutions, and see what they always click to change, and default it to what they change it to every time.
I dunno, it seems to me as if they could've at least made the existing icons scale properly in the middle of the new-style icon with dark blue rectangular border, to match the other ones. I'm not sure what (if any) design process was involved here.
Very intesting - it appears as if they snuck in an update to this just this past weekend. It's funny since I didn't get any maintenance downtime notices...
Edit: from the Hotfix release notes, I assume this is the item referenced in AN-218956.
Go Appian!
Hey Mike, We did end up hotfixing this (AN-218956) and removed support for GIF icons in the 22.4 process modeler due to how poorly the old icons looked with the new branding. If we don't detect a properly formatted SVG icon Appian will show the default plug-in icon. Plug-in Developers can follow the guidance our Appmarket team sent out if they want their icon to display.
What other data would you like included in the expression editor? If you do mouseover the variables we show the data type as well as the inline documentation.
I can't speak for all of these but when we re-added the expression editor in 22.4, we did add back the ability to mouse-over for data types + inline documentation (if available).