What’s new under the hood?

This post was written by Gabor Kovacs, our Software Development Team Lead.

We had a lot of shared content about our new UI lately, and I want to look at it from a developer perspective: what is new under the UI, what made this difference, and why it is more than just some changes in the frontend. I hope you will enjoy this look from a developer’s perspective.

We separated validations. Previously for all users, we had a very strong validation, that happens with a click of a button, and validates all pages, all data populated. This was a slower, also less specific solution, but most importantly very inconvenient for users. We went through validation, separated it into smaller parts, made it faster, and made it page by page, so the user will have direct immediate feedback.

We added units. A lot of them. It is not the shiniest feature, but in most cases, you can click on the unit selected on the screens, and select a lot of other units to use, within the metric and imperial range. You might think that this is only a small UI feature, but in the background, for years we had a very strong engine to handle different units with the most complex calculations, and in the last weeks we exposed it. Stay tuned and prepared for a lot of other options to use units in the future the way you want.

We added guidelines. Also seems like a frontend solution but we have a huge database, working together with the unit system I previously mentioned, to provide you the recommendations with the units you like. Just try to select guidelines at the start, and change – for example – your design temperature later to Fahrenheit, to see it in action.

We added the SITE. This means a lot of functionalities, some of which deserve their own article, but in short, we have a strong genetic algorithm in the background, that we added in recent months to design the best available site arrangement for the available space. We have Google Maps integration, and a lot more cool stuff around, many of that you can’t see yet, but I assure you, in the next weeks and months, this is going to have more and more, all ready prepared functionalities. Teasers: influent and effluent points on sites.

I hope I pointed out why these things are way more than just some UI change and shiny things ahead. But this is also important for the future because this is the foundation of what else we will provide for our precious customers.