⚡ Rill Developer is a tool that makes it effortless to transform your datasets with SQL and create powerful, opinionated dashboards. These are our release notes for our 0.15 release, still in Tech Preview. This release will have some breaking changes for existing projects. Before trying out 0.15, we recommend exporting your duckdb database as parquet files and re-importing them. Check the DuckDB documentation for more information.
To try out Rill Developer, check out these instructions and let us know over on Discord if you encounter any problems or have ideas about how to improve Rill Developer!
Motion and animation should be used to make an application more clear and delightful, but it also plays a role in drawing attention and perceiving change. This release of Rill Developer updates our line chart animations to help you see changes in your data when you change filters, time grains, and time ranges.
Often BI tools flicker data visualizations as they switches between different views of the data. This is unfortunate because it can lead to change blindness. Change blindness is a fundamental limitation in human visual perception and attention that often occurs when information is quickly removed before representing it. Under these conditions, people struggle to identify what has changed. This is a real problem when you are trying to make sense of changes in your data and you can’t see the difference easily.
Here are the main changes in 0.15:
- Chart animations help change perception — Rill has always had delightful chart animations, however this motion was not useful because they did not help you understand how the data has changed, it just attracted your eye. This release updates our animations to help you understand changes more intuitively through better cognitive support for change perception. These animation changes consider what it feels like as metrics grow or shrink on both the X and Y axis as you apply dimension value filters. By using smart animations to demonstrate these changes it is easier to track what happened.
- **Automatic source names ** – Remote source connections have required you to manually type in the name of the source that you would like to ingest, however this is often the same name of the file that you are importing. At Rill we want to create an opinionated way to quickly get from data to insights without fussing too much with configurations and names that are not necessary. In this release we have automated the creation of source names by creating a sanitized version of the file name as the source default.
- **Include / Exclude Filter Improvements ** – This release reworks the visual weight of colors and fonts that support understanding include and exclude filters. Together, these changes should improve the scanability of the dashboard when you are drilling down to find the most relevant insights.