First off, this community is great and the Thunkable platform is great to use for a non-coder like me!
I’ve been getting lots of support for app-building from the community of experts here, but it’s been quite sporadic. For example, some questions get answered within minutes, and others could take days or sometimes ongoing conversations (over chat) just disappear completely.
And this is understandable given that many members here actually have a day job and lives to attend to, which doesn’t involve providing on-demand tech support. But at the same time it’s quite inefficient for people trying to develop an app.
So, I was wondering if it’s possible to book ‘office hours’ with an expert user where there could be dedicated support for a period of say 30 or 60 minutes. It’d allow continuous back and forth conversation where a number of outstanding issues could be ironed out at once. And I’d be happy to pay for it too since it means a lot more efficiency.
You are talking about a really necessary service. Any platform, including Thunkable X, has a large number of features that a specialist who has worked with It for a long time in practice can know about. Unfortunately, I can only offer the service you are asking for to users from my own country - Russia. Perhaps someone will help you.
I just looked at your community profile and it seems that this is the very first question you’ve asked. Wondering what are the unanswered questions you’d like help with - happy to jump in if there’s something here that we’ve missed.
There’s no official “office hours” from the team here but it sounds like a really good idea and it might be something that one of our Power Thunkers would be interested in?
Again, if we had a little more context here, i.e. what you’re working on and where you’re stuck, we might be able to point you to the relevant samples, tutorials or community posts and save you the money altogether!
Thanks @domhnallohanlon! I’ve actually been around for a couple months, but under a different username, freddiedadog. Had login issues, changed to a new account, and here I am again =)
How to make the app display properly on different devices
How to optimize the code for speed (there’s still some lag which I’d love to remove, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m using blocks inefficiently)
For all these issues and others before I’ve searched the forums as well as chatted with some of the support folks here. Sometimes I find the answers I need, other times not. Case in point I was in a conversation halfway with Jane when the chat dialogue disappeared and now I have no idea if she got my reply =)
Suffice to say it’s not impossible to get support with the current way things are, but it takes a long time having multiple chats, bumping threads, waiting for replies, restarting conversations that have stalled. And for most of my issues as a newbie, either I can spend hours searching for answers on threads and asking around, or I’m sure a power thunker could solve most of them in a matter of minutes. I don’t mind spending a bit of money to do that, if someone wouldn’t mind spending a bit of time - at least I think that’s a win-win. Hope that gives some context!
Thanks @actech . Is there a way for us to just do it virtually? For example just agree on a time and communicate via Zoom, or even via private message? Just promise to stay online and continue responding to the conversation, for a max of 30 or 60 mins.
I looked at your project. In my opinion, it needs to be completely redone, which I don’t think you want at all.
I doubt whether to give you a link to your site with information, because I don’t know if you want to make an app or learn how to create apps. Therefore, I will give you some tips:
Work in portrait mode
practice creating interfaces for different devices Separately. Learn flexible layout using %, flexbox.
think Well about the data structure to get rid of this huge number of lists.
Thanks @actech. Yep, you’re right that I don’t want to completely redo the project, but I will if it’s needed.
I’m primarily looking to make the actual app, so this isn’t just an exercise to learn how to create apps in general.
And thanks for the tips. I guess for me they raise other questions which I’d love to get answers to, like why portrait mode if it’s supposed to be in landscape, and in ‘thinking about data structure’ what should I actually consider?
And I guess if I were to redo it, how should I go about it…
Portrait mode is easier to work with if you want to develop an app for your phones. If you want to develop an app only for a tablet, this is a different question, but the screen sizes of tablets are different.
What is the most important thing in the app-design, animation, beautiful buttons? No, the main thing in any app is data. You can create 50 or 100 lists, but keep in mind that the more blocks you have, the more errors there are in them, the less stable the app will work, and the more difficult it will be to update and search for errors in it. I know users who spent one month doing something that could have been done in 2 days. But they made their app for a month, created hundreds of unnecessary blocks and components, dozens of unnecessary screens, and the app didn’t work. Why? Because they immediately started from the end - with creating a design, and you had to start from the beginning and draw everything first on a piece of paper to see what they need to do, and not what they vaguely imagine in their head.
Thanks. Yup, I get that, which is why I’m hoping to get some one-on-one advice. Like really sit down with someone who knows the best way to design the app in thunkable to get some advice. If I could spend 10mins describing what the app is and how it’s supposed to work, and then maybe another 15-20 mins getting advice on how to go about setting it up, that’d enable me to get the right approach from the start - then I could go back and do the actual work and troubleshoot along the way.
I’m not opposed to redo-ing it completely. I’ve already recreated it from scratch once, so if it’s done right it can be pretty fast. But I’d like to know that this time it’s a more efficient set up and I’m not running down another wrong path.
The app is primarily meant for tablets because it’s for young children and they need a bigger screen to look at, and that’s also why it’s landscape. But I’d like it to appear at least not garbled on a phone in case someone downloads it on a their phone to just check it out.
Just out of curiosity @fddog - do you have any idea of how long (in hours of your time), approximately, you spent designing your original design, and then how long it took you to come up with your current design?
We’re working on a larger design project at the moment so this would be quite helpful for us to know.
@domhnallohanlon, I spent about 3 weeks doing the first iteration just in the evenings and weekends, so maybe 40-50hrs total? A lot of that was reading up on how to do stuff as opposed to actually putting it together.
The second time around I got it working within 2 days (~6hrs maybe?) to the same level of functionality it was before, and the rest of the time since then has been on adding other stuff and modifying the design.
