Workspace 6.0 Released
Workspace 6.0 has just been released, and we’re excited to share the new features that the team have been working on this year. The team’s focus with this release is to continue to improve the user experience for both beginners and experienced developers alike.
Miniaturised operations
To better utilise finite screen space, the Workspace team has miniaturised three core Workspace operations; WorkspaceInputs, WorkspaceOutputs and Variables. These three operations have a single specific purpose; they simply hold or pass data objects. This is unlike most other operations that typically perform arbitrary computational tasks. The team wanted users to easily distinguish these three operations from standard operations by drawing them differently.
| Workspace 5.4 | Workspace 6.0 |
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Operation racks
In larger workflows, we often see emergence of clusters of WorkspaceInputs, WorkspaceOutputs and Variables operations grouped together with many-to-one connections.
A new feature that we have added is the ability to group these operations together into operation racks. Operation racks are constructed by a drag/drop mechanism.
Similarly, operations can be removed from a rack or moved to another rack by drag/drop.
Operation racks provide the convenience of allowing the rack contents to be moved without having to select all the rack contents
Just like port racks, operation racks expand when the mouse cursor enters the operation rack region and then collapses when the mouse cursor leaves. Operation racks can be pinned to stop it from collapsing. Collapsed operation racks can ‘compress’ large numbers of connections together which helps reduce visual information overload when viewing complex workflows.
| Workspace 5.4 | Workspace 6.0 |
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| 15 connections | 3 connections |
Operation racks include an attached text box which can be used to document logical groupings.
Dependencies
Dependencies are an advanced feature that sometimes causes confusion for new users. For this reason, Dependencies are hidden by default and can be toggled back on when needed using the toolbar button (keyboard shortcut ‘D’). There are a few exceptions where Dependencies are never hidden such as when a Dependency is in-use by being connected to another port or having a global name assigned to it. Dependencies are always shown on operations that have no other Outputs such as the LogText operation.
New view modes
Focus on the core of your workflow by fading or hiding WorkspaceInputs, WorkspaceOutputs and Variables using a convenient toolbar button.
Simpler loops
Loops require users to create what appear to be circular dependencies which is frequently a cause of confusion. In Workspace 6.0, the existing loop operations have been deprecated in favour of new ForLoop, ConditionalLoop and FileLoop operations. These new loop operations are built into the existing workflow nesting infrastructure which allows users to embed their loop bodies within the looping operations themselves. We’ve updated or documentation and sample workflows to help you get the hang of the new system.
The complete changelog for this release is available here.
As always, we would be really glad to hear from you if you have any feedback.