45 Ideas for Thunkable Improvement

@tatiang , fantastic!

Your list matches with my list in some items, but looks you have additional itens we can remix in a single list…

Because I’m only working with the StP version of Thunkable, I don’t know much about the requests for the DnD interface. The only thing for me now, is guarantee that we have an conversion tool from StP to DnD, good documentation and a full support for the features of the previous version before end the support of StP. I saw a long list described by @muneer of itens that are not okay to move to the last version in Christina’s post, so hope to see this fixed in the future before I move my projects.

But essentially my suggestions are to the StP version in order I can apply to my current projects.

Do you agree to mix our lists here and help the staff knows and understand our needs?

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You can already convert from StP to DnD. It’s not perfect but it’s a good start. I guess it’s a beta testing version because I have it but I’m not sure everyone else does. You cannot convert from DnD to StP.

I think it’s fine to mix our lists.

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Definitely agree with 1 and 2! Those are two things that I have dealt with a lot in my app. I have started to clean up my app’s blocks now to make it easier for me to follow everything and I have a few functions which are identical across several screens. It was easy to copy and paste them from one into all of the others, but global functions would be awesome! The variables thing was a bit strange to me until I figured out the sort order. Alphabetical would make the most sense to me, but I’ve learned to live with it at this point.

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5 and 20 are my favorites :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: as it will boost my work

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If Global Functions can be implemented in Thunkable then it would be an opportunity to use my own functions to connect to Firestore instead of Realtime DB.

Firestore has many advantages over Realtime DB some of which:

  • Larger base and classifies entries by default
  • Sores data in a form very much like a spreadsheet making it ideal for tabular data.
  • Can include pagination when retrieving data.
  • Can create your own listeners from the database side and connect them to your functions.
    Can use server functions to process database maintenance without user intervention. This is also relavent to Realtime DB but all Google example is using Firestore.
  • Can handle external triggers such as notifications.
    See trigger documentation for more info.
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See this post

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Well, my suggestion #22 is to provide native connection to Firestore. Your arguments reinforce the advantages to implement Firestore on Thunkable, hope they consider providing all the functionalities you mention natively.

Anyway, having the Global Functions, our daily work will be easier while keeping code light and clean, and also allows to “extend” Thunkable functionality by making real libraries of functions to use across the projects (maybe a new bussiness of “library creator” will born after this).

In other words: if Thunkable don’t implement Firestore access soon, we can develop our own connection layer using Global Functions. :wink:

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Well, I never had access to this tool… so I can’t comment about…

Hope they make available soon…

But 1st, they need to improve the DnD to cover all missing points mentioned by you on the list above plus the @munner points here, otherwise, at least for me don’t make sense to convert my projects with functional gaps…

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Humm… very interesting! For a single function the timer performs the rule with the use of app variables… CLEVER!

But for a complex library with lots of functions, it’s almost impossible to work with this approach (creating timers for each function), don’t you agree?

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In CRUD operations you will need a minimum of 4 functions anyway, if I have to create 4 timers to call these functions then why not.

Although no one can stop you from running all the 4 functions from a single timer event. Create a variable for operation type and the timer will check which operation type to execute the relevant function.

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In another topic, it was suggested that a crash log display the last “line” or block that was run. I like that idea. I also want to suggest that Thunkable add a way to monitor app & stored variable values during runtime.

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Hello @tatiang !

I will edit the post in each new feature request someone posts here in this topic. And the suggestions above are great ideas for Thunkable improvement.

We don’t have any feedback from the team about this topic, so let’s try keep it alive :wink:

Regards,

Paulo Vaz

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Added two new requests, regarding this and this posts.

Adding 2 more requests… 44 & 45!

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Some of these have been implemented but I think it’s a still a very useful list of suggestions for improving Thunkable.

I think thunkable has a big potential if it’s taken care of properly, I ran into so many problems when trying to do some specific stuff with thunkable and had to use crazy workarounds, like to be able to develop with thunkable you have to design the app with thunkable in mind which really limits freedom

I would like to add floating column so we can customise Alert or any purpose Thunkers want.

We need to see the next release ASAP, Please.

Fantastic list and it would be amazing if they could all be incorporated into Thunkable!
For large project in particular, they would be extremely useful.

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17 months later, I think we have:

#1 to some extent
#12 at least as far as version history goes
#13 (I think it’s still available)
#17 may be possible with Custom Components
#19 seems improved to me
#26: not sure what this is but we have Version History for projects
#27 requires a Team membership
#32 could be covered by Custom Components
#36 has been addressed by more frequent staff comments on the forums
#38: it seems like this is being worked on recently

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