Changes to MyQuickBase

By jrice | Posted on May 30th, 2006

In the upcoming update to QuickBase we’ve made some changes to the MyQuickBase page that we want to make you aware of.  If you’re the manager of a QuickBase application at your site, you may, in turn, want to make your users aware of these changes so they’re not too surprised on the Monday morning after our next software update.

Most of the changes that you’ll notice right away are cosmetic.  While not the driving reason to make changes to the MyQuickBase page, we did take this opportunity to clean the page up a bit and, hopefully, improving the layout.

What really drove this redesign was performance.  We wanted the MyQuickBase page to be faster for users with access to many QuickBases.  So most of the important changes are internal.  For instance, if you have access to multiple QuickBases, sorting the list of applications now takes place "client-side" (in the browser) rather than making a request back to the QuickBase server and having the QuickBase server return a new page.  Likewise, if you assign categories to applications or hide applications, the results are instantaneous.

Another consideration in the redesign was to make the page simpler for first-time users.  First-time users typically have access to a small number of QuickBase applications.  The extra columns for Last Visited and Manager aren’t particularly relevant and make the screen a bit harder to digest.  Likewise categorizing applications isn’t very important when a user only has access to a few. So the MyQuickBase page has two modes now: Simple Display and Detailed display.  Simple Display is the default for new users and is shown below:

To toggle between these two modes, use the menu that appears when you click on the Applications heading above the list of applications.

This menu is the biggest functional change.  Notice that there is no longer an "I want to…" menu.  If you use categories on your MyQuickBase page, you’ll notice that that menu is also gone.  Both have been combined into a single menu that is reached by clicking on the Applications heading above the list of applications.  In Simple mode, this menu is likewise simple.  It only lets you go to Detailed mode or search for an application.  In Detailed mode this menu allows you to show work with categories and clear flags as well.  The menu and Detailed mode look like this:

Right-clicking on an application in the list of applications, is still the way to set categories, hide applications, and delete applications.

One important thing to note is that Simple/Detailed mode is sticky.  When you switch to Simple or Detailed mode, QuickBase will remember the mode the next time you come back to your MyQuickBase page.  So don’t worry that you’ll have to constantly switch between modes.

These changes are a relatively minor part of our next update but because of the high visibility of the MyQuickBase page, we did want to make you aware before the release to give you an opportunity to make your users aware.

Hope this is helpful,
Joe