New Neo4j Desktop Release With Cool and Important Features
The focus for this release (1.1.14) of Neo4j Desktop has been to tighten up the security for our users and to continue to evolve the integration support for third party app vendors. But we also added a command bar as a neat feature that should make you more productive and happy. Plus deep-linking which improves integration inside and outside of Neo4j Desktop.
Installations and Update
If you haven’t installed Neo4j Desktop yet, it’s about time. You find it at the Neo4j Download Center and it comes even with a free license of Neo4j Enterprise for Developers.
Otherwise you see a green notification in the side-bar with the bell icon, which takes you to the update button to download and install this update.
Go, do it now, we wait.
We’ll highlight a few important new features in this blog post.
Command bar
Our users like to be productive and we have added a new tool to help with that.
The Command bar, invoked by pressing cmd+k on macOS and ctrl+k on Windows / Linux, is a productivity tool that will help our users perform various operations.
It learns over time and will fit better and better into the user’s usage pattern.
Here are a few operations it currently can perform:
- Start graphs
- Stop active graph
- Show log file of Neo4j Desktop
- Show log file of active graph
- Take the user to the manage view of any graph
- Open graph apps
- Show ip address
More commands will be added, we’re open to ideas and feedback on what to add here. So please let us know which operations you want to have quick access to.
Signed Graph Applications
Prior to this release when our users were about to install a graph application they would be prompted with a modal saying along the lines of: “Graph app is given access to your graph data, only add apps that you trust”.
In Neo4j Desktop 1.1.14, graph applications can be signed and verified as trusted by Neo4j. Any signed and verified application will directly install.
With a signed graph application the user can trust that the vendor of the application is who it claims to be and that the contents of the graph applications hasn’t been tampered with.
The user can still install unsigned graph applications but the prompt have changed it contents to this.
Privileged Graph Application operations
This change is about the user giving graph applications permission to perform certain operations.
Think of a newly installed application on your mobile device. If the app wants access to the camera, it needs to ask for it and the user grants/denies it.
This is the first iteration of this feature and can be found in the graph application sidebar.
Deep linking
Since Neo4j Desktop 1.1.13 we have supported deep linking into graph applications.
With this release we have iterated on it to support installing graph applications through deep links.
To enable that we needed to restructure the format a bit, so deep linking into for example Neo4j Browser now looks like this (old format still supported).
neo4j://graphapps/neo4j-browser?cmd=play&arg=cypherInstalling Graph Applications
There are two new ways of installing graph applications.
The first is that the users now can install from the file system, using the `file://` protocol. This is useful if you are in an disconnected/offline environment and you cannot load apps from a repository URL.
The other way is automatic installation via a deep link.
Given a user has Neo4j Desktop installed and clicks on a link like:
neo4j://graphapps/install?url=<url-to-graph-app>the user will automatically start the application installation process without having to enter it in the applications sidebar.
Here you can for example install the Neo4j ETL Tool
neo4j://graphapps/install?url=https://r.neo4j.com/neo4j-etl-app
Thanks,
The Neo4j Desktop Team
