Creator roadmap for the rest of 2022

Hi everyone,

Hope you're all good!

Thanks for continuing to make this community engaging and informative.

Today we'd like to share with you our plans for the near future of Creator. We always strive to strike a good balance of features and enhancements to cater to the different segments of the Creator audience. While we've got some exciting features lined-up that you've been expecting from us, we're also thrilled to announce that there are a few surprises and some key market differentiators as well!

The following roadmap gives you the gist of what's coming up, and more details about each feature will be posted here as we close on the various release dates.

Read on to know about the features planned to be rolled out during Quarter 3, 2022.

AR library
We're delighted to announce that we'll soon be bringing augmented reality (AR) in Zoho Creator! The AR library enables you to set up an immersive augmented reality experience for your users. An application can have 3D objects in its AR library, which can be accessed via AR fields and annotated in the real world using compatible iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. This real-time digital interaction provides better data visualization and enhances end-user experiences, providing you with exciting new business opportunities.

Released on: Sep-2022

Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/community/topic/zoho-creator-introducing-augmented-reality

Company logo
Your apps will soon be able to better reflect your company image with customized branding details. With this feature, a company logo and favicon can be uploaded and will be displayed when you access your application in live.

Released on: Oct-2022

Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/applications/articles/set-theme-for-your-application#Logo_Preference

Theme colors
The color scheme of an application not only makes it more attractive but also keeps it distinct from your portfolio of other apps. With this update, you'll be able to select a color of your own choice for your application theme, to make them visually more appealing and maintain branding guidelines across apps.

Released on: Oct-2022

Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/applications/articles/set-theme-for-your-application#Color_Options

Application fonts
Font choice plays an important role in the readability and aesthetics of an application and determines the brand perception. With this update, you'll be able to choose fonts from a predefined list, as a part of theme customization. You can also choose different fonts for different form factors, like web, mobile, and tablet.

Released on: Oct-2022

Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/applications/articles/set-theme-for-your-application#Choose_Font

Push notifications
Notifications are the modern-day solution to keep your users informed and engaged. Push notifications are a powerful means to reach your app users anytime, whether or not they are in your app, to capture their attention and reengage them. Creator notifications are undergoing a major makeover to support real-time notifications for approval workflows, blueprint workflows, and record comments across web, mobile, and tablet devices.

Released on: Oct-2022

Reference:https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/others/notifications/articles/notifications-17-10-2022

Form titles
Interaction with forms can become more meaningful when we have contextual information. We're going to introduce form titles that'll enable you to set different display titles for the two primary actions in a form — adding a record and editing a record.

Released on: Aug-2022

Reference: https://www.zoho.com/creator/help/forms/understand-form-title.html

Dark mode for Android
Yes, you heard it right! We're going to extend dark mode support to Android apps. Dark mode, which is great for low-light situations and is easier on your eyes, will be automatically enabled based on your default system settings.

Released on: Sep-2022

Blueprint analytics
Understanding the performance of a blueprint workflow and gaining insights to optimize its efficiency is a key aspect of every business management process. We'll soon be introducing blueprint analytics to provide vital information like average time taken per blueprint, average time taken per stage/transition, total number of transition occurrences, etc., to give complete insights into your apps' blueprints.

Released on: Oct-2022
Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/operations/blueprint-analytics/articles/understand-blueprint-analytics

Custom connectors
Prebuilt services available in Connections help you seamlessly integrate your Creator application with various other cloud services. In certain scenarios, organizations might have unique requirements that would require usage of other third-party connectors, not supported by Creator. Such integrations can be achieved by adding them via custom connectors.

Released on: Nov-2022
Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/microservices/understand-connections/articles/understand-connectors#Custom_Connectors

To know about the features planned to be rolled out during Quarter 4, 2022, scroll further!

Custom AI models
AI fields in Creator make your applications smarter by utilizing advanced machine learning techniques. Custom AI models can help your applications become more intelligent using custom-trained OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and object detection algorithms, based on the images you upload. Custom-trained OCR makes predictions and processes written text from digital images into machine-readable text.

Released on: Feb-2023
Reference: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/creator/developer-guide/microservices/ai-modeler/articles/understand-ai-modeler#Model_Types

Pop-up subforms
Vertical scrolling is conventional and intuitive when working with subforms that contain numerous fields. This feature will open a subform in a pop-up while adding and editing a row, which ensures better user experience and space management.

List-type subforms
We're introducing a table-like subform without inline inputs, which looks similar to our list report. This is suitable for subforms, that you expect to experience less-frequent modifications and have a large number of line items.

Subform custom sorting
Using this feature, users can manually reorder the row sequence of a subform, while adding and editing records. This feature is great for use cases beyond field-based ordering, when the fields in the subform need to be sorted in a specific order.

Form cache
At times, a user might close the browser window or navigate to another component accidentally while filling in a form. To avoid data loss in these scenarios, we'll be storing the form data temporarily, so that users can continue from where they were when they accidentally left the form.

Blueprint Deluge tasks
Programmatic controls for blueprint workflows help automate business processes. We'll be introducing Deluge tasks to change the stages and transitions of a blueprint. Also, blueprints will be automatically initiated for records added through Deluge.

Released on: Feb-2023
Reference: https://www.zoho.com/deluge/help/creator-blueprint-tasks.html

User connections
Workflows involving connections will soon prompt user authentication when accessing applications in live. This will help identify the exact user using the third-party services, and permissions will be applied based on that service.

Extensions
Zoho Marketplace is a unified platform that hosts low-code apps published by developers that can be utilized by clients on multiple platforms. In the Marketplace, you can now publish one or more app components, which can be installed into existing applications. For the first phase, widgets can be published and installed into an existing application.

Early 2023 releases

We are excited to announce a few of our features that are expected to be launched early next year!

Canvas builder
We'll be introducing a Canvas builder for creating flexible and visually appealing detail views of reports. In the initial phase, this builder will be supported only in the web interface.

Subforms in stateless forms
With this update, you'll be able to add subforms in stateless forms. Since stateless forms don't store any data, users can use subform insert row, clear row, and access field Deluge tasks to manage subform data.

Advanced email analytics
Gaining insights about emails sent from your apps can help complete the email notification life cycle. To achieve this, we'll be introducing advanced email analytics that'll inform you about delivery status, enable recipient activity tracking, and provide you with a detailed log to improve email performance powered by Zoho ZeptoMail.

OTP login
Portal users who don't have email addresses will be able to use their phone number as an alternate method for signing up and signing in, with OTP-based authentication.

Login template
Creator offers a default and robust design for each of the customer portal pages, which you can further customize using the portal page designer. With this update, we'll be supporting prebuilt templates and additional customization controls for portal login, signup, and reset passwords pages.

Deluge editor
Similar to your application IDE, intuitive error messages will be shown in the Deluge editor while scripting itself i.e. before saving your script. Apart from this, customizing keyboard shortcuts, full screen mode and a few other enhancements are on the way.

App installation setup
Installing applications from the marketplace requires basic information to guide/setup the user configurations. For example, this includes selecting the timezone, date format etc., Using predefined configurations before publishing apps to marketplace will help users during the installation process.

We appreciate that you have all been patient with us. It's your continued support and understanding that motivates us to keep pushing our boundaries and add exciting new features. Also, we are aware that some of your requests were not fulfilled at this time, but please be assured that we are still working on them.

We hope this announcement post will help you in planning your upcoming projects and apps in advance. Finally, please note that there could be small changes to the scope of these features and release timelines, but we're committed and confident that we'll be able to deliver on all the exciting updates we've announced.

Wait! This isn't the complete list. We have even more surprises cooking in our labs, and can’t wait to share all of that with you! So stay tuned and keep watching this space for updates. Meanwhile, do keep using Creator and keep the feedback coming!

Prakash,
Product Management,
The Zoho Creator team.

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