@bilastois Yes, I do use those comments but I find them not to be very helpful to me as an app developer. They are hidden by default and when I do display then, they end up floating far away from the original block which is a pain. They are also hard to grab – I have to really focus and slow down to grab and move them.
@jared Sure, I could. But those comment windows (for lack of a better term) and function parameter windows mysteriously end up a full screen away from where they started. So I’ll re-open a project and the comment will have a long, long tail showing where I need to find it. It’s quite annoying.
And yeah, you made that comment window nice and big so I guess that could stay the same. I’d really like to be able to lock the comment into a particular place in the code rather than have it floating.
And possibly to have a larger font. I would use comments as notes but also as bookmarks of sorts where I could zoom out and quickly find a place among the blocks that I had designated.
@jared Here’s an example of a comment I added, typed a few words into, and then left open right above the block where I created it. You can see that the comment “tail” goes way down below the blocks:
tatiang, the pop up for comment, Object Properties, Text Join, etc. often appear off the screen. And it makes me a little crazy.
I think this issue (along with many thunkable useability issues) arise from the fundamental assumption that Thunkable is a tool to introduce programming to novices. The UI is tuned to short lists, associated with simple apps. Although the business model is trying to extend the user base to commercial (ie PRO) apps, the UI needs of advanced app developer are very different from novices.
I have fantasies of Thunkable polling PRO (or near-PRO) users for use cases. Perhaps that will occur in the future. It seems to me Thunkable is currently focused on expanding their base of novice users. That make strategic sense to me. It reminds me of the 1980s (I am so old) when Apple gave schools Apple II computers to increase the user base. Maybe that will payoff, maybe not. But that seems to be where their effort is focused.
I would like a tool similar to those in the Microsoft office products where you can drop a text box into place anywhere in the document you’re working on
@drted I’m a child of the '80s, too. That’s an interesting perspective. It pays to pay attention to the target audience. You may be right. Polling users sounds like a very good idea since that’s where the money comes from.
I think a comment block that can be dragged to where we need it is best. adding a comment that is part of a specific block makes it go down to the bottom of the whole block and you need to click to see it. i have been using an orphan text field to try to put some comments where i need them but this is not ideal.
@tatiang Update here: there will be some sort of additional commenting available soon. I am not sure which plans will have it yet but we’ve been doing some testing of this.
I’ll also update this topic category to Feature Requests.
Please consider not paywalling this feature. It would be ridiculous to have to pay extra to use the comment feature that is part of every other coding language. I hope you really think about that as a company. It would not be a good look for Thunkable!
You obviously need to make a profit by separating out features that people will pay for, I get that. But this would be a big mistake. @wei@Chris_Anderson
There are enough things that customers have requested over the years that are powerful, valuable additions not yet part of Thunkable that can be paid features. This doesn’t need to be one of them.
I’ve disappeared off the face of this earth for quite a while, haven’t i?
I love this idea- a comment block. While commenting is quite a handy feature, it’s also just a little something extra to help you code more efficiently. This could probably go under the bottom rung of PRO, though (Starter).
As an alternative, I like to take labels, set them to invisible, and use a text block with capital letters to demarcate bits and pieces of my code. It works pretty well, though my eyes typically skim over the label blocks without realizing that they’re my self-made comments. So I use an online font generator to copy-paste my comments into the same label blocks but with different fonts, so they’re more visible.
Of course, it’s not the quickest or most convenient solution but it works. There’s no extending of the block size either, so that’s an added negative (oxymorons, anybody?).