Our latest update for Fulcrum on Android got some design updates and improvements to match Google’s Material Design specifications for layouts, look and feel, and interaction. You’ll see right away in version 2.13 that the app list is now presented as a drawer that slides out from the left. The form user interface has also gotten a facelift to conform to the Material standards.
Google announced their Material design language last year, and many common apps—including all of Google’s like Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Hangouts, and others—have been updated to match. Getting Fulcrum up to date with the latest design standards helps improve usability across the board, since it provides similarity in patterns of interaction and layout that make it easier to learn for new Fulcrum users already comfortable with UX patterns in other Android applications.
In this update, we’ve also made some significant performance enhancements to the synchronizer to handle larger quantities of data. Some performance benchmarks reveal some massive improvement in time required to sync large datasets down to the Fulcrum Android app (for taking and editing offline). We ran a couple of tests between the previous version (2.12.3) and our latest update (2.13.0) to measure the performance gains.
Our two separate test scenarios included one test with a large number of apps and records, and a second test with fewer apps, but more records in each:
- Test 1 – 57 apps, 8,994 records
- Test 2 – 4 apps, 15,225 records
The reduction in synchronizing time is a huge gain, and makes it much faster to dispatch large datasets to your field devices, even over cellular networks.
If you’re an Android user and haven’t yet installed the latest update, head to the Google Play store to grab the update.