KNIME Modern UI Preview

Thought of another thing.

It would be super if changes to variable names propagated to downstream nodes. I know that’s probably a heavy lift, so just a suggestion. :sweat_smile:

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I know I am totally spamming the thread…

  • When searching nodes, group search results by category rather than string similarity.

Another “cool” thing would be to be able to see nodes that provide or accept ports by clicking those ports on a node in the workflow (with necessary requirements, like if a node needs a URI, only nodes that generate URIs would be listed in “Inputs”).

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The user typed text is too small.

Hello community,
Thank you for all the great feedback and the various ideas.

We are happy to announce new features for the KNIME Modern UI Preview.

With the latest release we have added the following features to the Modern UI Preview

  • Support for dynamic ports at native nodes – add ports directly at natives nodes, the same way like for components and metanodes, by clicking the “+” button.
  • Add ports and connect the nodes automatically at metanodes or components or dynamic ports at native nodes by dropping ports on the “+” button.
  • Quick nodes adding by dragging a port out of a node. After that receive a panel with the 12 most common used nodes based on the workflow coach data. Add and connect the desired node by simply clicking on it.
  • Table view based on the new “Table View (Labs)” node, with the possibility to use basic filtering, basic search or resize the columns.
  • Application tab bar, to work with multiple opened workflows in multiple application tabs – e.g. copy and paste nodes from one to another workflow.
  • Copy and paste nodes.

More features come in the future

We will add more features in the future, like:

  • Node label and workflow annotation editor
  • Handle dropped items (files, workflows, nodes …)
  • Space explorer
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So far, I really enjoy using the new user interface. It looks very good!

A couple of things:

  • When I click on an output node (the Geospatial View node, specifically), the results pane shows the Flow Variables tab. When I then click on any other node, such as a manipulator node, the results pane remains on the Flow Variables tab. Would it be reasonable to default to the data tab for these nodes?
  • When I drag a node onto the canvas, can we drag the node on top of an existing connector and have it added automatically? This was possible with the older interface.
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  • Thanks for the idea, we will look at how to improve this in a future release.
  • Replacing a node or dropping it on a connector to add the node between nodes is not implemented yet, but will be added in a future release.
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hi. How do I activate the new UI?

I found it, thanks a lot

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First, some great usability enhancements within the Modern UI, especially in this latest round of updates in 4.7 – exciting things are happening here so keep up the good work! :slightly_smiling_face:

That said, my company has one major concern…

Internally, we created a visualizer (i.e., a “blue” KNIME node) built upon the Java 2D API that also leverages the “highlighting” feature within KNIME – we use this frequently to display models and trace back visual anomalies to our input tables.

In trying out the Modern UI, we noticed that our custom visualizer did not have a “magnifying glass” option to view the plot whatsoever – this seems to be the case for all non-JavaScript visualizers (e.g., the “Local (Swing)” category of nodes). It also appears that the “highlighting” feature is not accessible within the tables (i.e., you cannot see what you highlighted in the table views). We noted that you can still use the “HiLite Row Splitter” node to figure out what was highlighted so the information is still stored, but there seems to be no way to make and track selections within the tables anymore.

This raises a few questions:

  • Will non-JavaScript visualizers ever be viewable within the Modern UI? (If not, this would be a significantly blow to our ability to use KNIME going forward.)
  • Will highlighting ever be accessible within the tables views of the Modern UI? (This was one of the biggest draws of KNIME as it allowed you to trace the evolution of your analysis on specific points of data.)
  • At what point will the Modern UI become the “only” option? (I noticed a team member stated, “someday in the future the current user interface will not be maintained anymore” so it would be nice to have general timeline for this transition.)

Aside from this, I did note one other technical issue:

  • If the user has a 4K monitor and is also using the Linux version of KNIME, then the Modern UI does not “extend” across the entire screen. That is to say, only a quarter of the window displays the UI while the rest of the screen is “greyed out”. Looking back in forum posts, it seems a similar issue of 4K + Linux has come up before yet with no resolution (see Node-icons and dialogs with HiDPI (linux) - KNIME Analytics Platform - KNIME Community Forum).

Again, keep up the good work! :grinning:

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Make the filter option on the data preview always stay visible. Right now we need to scroll to the right; it is tedious when a table has many columns.

I can’t see how to access the console in the Modern UI.

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Im really struggling to like the new interface. Im finding its giving up the practicality and space saving for more nicer looking ui. im sure the final ui will look much different as you get more feedback. but right now when i go into the modern UI i just feel like it’s not as practical as the old ui… in the old UI it is a bit of a challenge finding a node inside the nested tree structure but in the new ui the larger icons are just distracting. this is my own opinion others may be very different :slight_smile:

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Not really related to modern UI but you can simply install your own code into the python environment you use in knime using developer mode so that always the newest version (eg your git repo) is used.

(python -m pip install -e /path/to/my_package)

I had made a general assumption that eventually the new UI would support all of the same keyboard shortcut functionality as the old UI, but that is probably not a safe assumption since the new approach is very visual / drag and drop focused.

Right now nodes can’t be inserted via keyboard command (everything seems to work but the final step of insert via the enter button), control + left click doesn’t multiple select, connect and disconnect nodes doesn’t work, and a myriad of other missing shortcut functions.

I know this is just a preview of the UI, but wanted to make sure you didn’t forget about us shortcut / macro guys. :wink:

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@jude_ran Thanks you for the great feedback and the questions.

  • Will non-JavaScript visualizers ever be viewable within the Modern UI?

Yes we will add this to the Modern UI. As we started to develop new javascript views with a new underlying framework, for us a few things would be really interesting about this use case:

  • what kind of visualisation is it
  • which use case does it solve
  • would you be interested in transforming this from a Java based view into a JavaScript view, based on the new framework.
  • Will highlighting ever be accessible within the tables views of the Modern UI?

Yes, we have plans to do so, but currently there are other important things we are focussing on.

  • At what point will the Modern UI become the “only” option? (I noticed a team member stated, “someday in the future the current user interface will not be maintained anymore” so it would be nice to have general timeline for this transition.)

There is no date set yet, a next step will be to have the Modern UI as the default perspective, that means you end up in the Modern UI when you start the KNIME Analytics Platform; with the possibility to switch back to the current user interface. At the moment there are no plans, to remove the way to switch back to the current user interface.

  • If the user has a 4K monitor and is also using the Linux version of KNIME, then the Modern UI does not “extend” across the entire screen .

Could you please provide more information about your current linux distribution.

@Marthael

Make the filter option on the data preview always stay visible. Right now we need to scroll to the right; it is tedious when a table has many columns. […]

We are aware of this limitation. To make them fixed and always visible on the right is already on our list.
The console is not implemented yet.

@kb2010

Im really struggling to like the new interface. Im finding its giving up the practicality […]

Thanks for the node repo feedback. We are thinking about a list based view with smaller node repo icons in addition to the current node repo ui.

@iCFO

[…] but wanted to make sure you didn’t forget about us shortcut / macro guys.

We have already started to create shortcuts and added them for most of the things we already re-did. There are lots of shortcuts in the current AP and it will take some time before we can convert all of them. Adding/removing nodes to the selection changed a bit and is at the moment only possible with SHIFT.

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Hi guys,

The functionality of the new UI seems a bit limited when compared to the regular UI.
I prefer the old UI personally. It also isn’t able to switch between open workflows? That’s really not great.

1 Like

Hi @Albert123
With version 4.7.0 we have introduced the possibility to open multiple workflows.

When you switch to the Modern UI Preview perspective, you see the current entry page. After opening a workflow, you will see a first workflow tab. Now you have to switch back to the initial page via the button in the upper left corner. You are now able to open another workflow.

Screen Recording 2023-02-07 at 8.25.28 AM

The Modern UI Preview is considered a preview and is currently under development — so at the moment not everything is available. In the future, more features will be added, like an integrated Space explorer, Node labels ….

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can you add the ability to add images as annotations to the UI? For e.g. instead of drawing boxes around nodes, if you give ability to display images in the workspace it will allow for better documentation of the workflow and make it more visually appealing.

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Thanks for the idea. We will include this in our considerations for workflow annotations inside Modern UI.

Hello community,

Thank you for all the great feedback and ideas. We are happy to announce the early access release of KNIME Analytics Platform Version 5. Please post your feedback in the following thread:

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