I've just recently started working with MashZone and am makeing a demo for a client. While working on this I've come across quite a few simple things I miss in MashZone or simply can't find. Most of these are so basic that I'm supprised they are not there.
Here's my list (aka my wishlist):
Data Feeds:
- Regular expressions for find, replace, extract, ... These are so simple and powerfull for data manipulation that they are a must. I have circumvented their lack by using 10+ operators where one single replace regexp would have been enough. This also brings me to the next point:
- I miss the ability to group operations, show/hide groups, name groups, give groups a description. When a datafeeds become complex and cluttered it might be possible to understand whats going on right after they where first designed. But if you come back after a while has passed it will probably be very hard to know exactly what is beeing done where. Beeing able to group operators, give groups a name and a description (sort of like commenting code) would reduce the effort quite a bit. Beeing able to show and hide these groups would prevent complex datafeeds from becoming cluttered.
MashApp:
- If no item of a table is selected all linked filters have the option to also select nothing (currently it acts as if all items are selected). I have a series of tables which filter each other. Idealy I would like the second table to be empty untill something is selected in the first table, the third to be empty untill something was selected in the second and so on. But currently the seond one displays the items as if everything of the first table was selected...
- Option to prevent tables from colapsing entries with same content (especially if the hidden columns contains different elements). This is simple: I want the ability to show duplicates and not auto-colapse these duplicates....
- Table cel or row background colour dependant on cell's value. Here I mean text! Not only numbers. A "Failed" might want a little red traffic light next to it...
- Linebreaks within a table's cell... It is currently not possible to show a long text in a table. The option to toggle this on&off would be good.
- Textarea scrollbar. Textareas are not scrollable?! Please!
- Textarea text alignment top, middle, bottom. I only found the option to align left, center, right. Now for a multi-line text where I don't know how many lines it will be always having it float in the middle is really bad. Especially in combination with the missing scrollbars this is realy bad. If I have a text which might be one line, but might be 200 and put a long textarea in there to fit the max size of the text, the one line will be hanging in air way down on the page because its "middle" aligned.
- Textarea format (i.e. colour) according to value (both text and numbers!). Again, a very basic feature...
- Insert shapes. I would like the ability to draw things with simple shapes, lines and arrows. This way I could draw processes and fill their status from data feeds.
If any of these are there but I just haven't found them, please tell me!
In the current state with these basic things missing MashZone really isn't very impressive.
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