I’m new to this and I love the simplicity of it, but I have run into so many bugs.
Often, my live test won’t do the most basic of functions. I create a save into DB function and then navigate to other screen, and then the live view screen goes blank.
I cannot delete variables that I am no longer using and it seems that further variables become useless. I’ve reviewed my code mulitiple times.
It’s odd to me that this is designed to be simple but has some serious and obvious flaws.
I agree with you. I often think that Thunkable X is designed for programmers. Why? Because as a programmer I know a lot of things and for this reason it is easy for me to work with this platform and I have no problems with determining where the error is in my code or it is a system bug. But I have a good idea of how users who are not familiar with programming at all feel. For them, every stone on the road turns into a mountain, which is not clear how to get around.
As for your problem, you need to disable all blocks, do step-by-step debugging, and display all block values on the screen.
Thunkable is a really interesting product. I did quite a bit of amateur app development for the past ten years and in many ways, this is a dream tool. I can connect to Google Sheets and request API data and so much more. Things I couldn’t do or that would have taken hours and hours to try to add manually to whatever tool/engine I was using.
But the more accessible you make something that is complex, the more there’s a chance something can go wrong. I’ve had many frustrating moments starting at white screens and wondering why Thunkable live crashes instantly.
But @actech is right that learning to debug is a crucial part of using Thunkable. Using things like wait blocks and changing (actually, I append…) label values every few steps throughout your code will give you a good sense of where things are failing.
1 Like
@ges0110 I couldn’t agree more with @actech and @tatiang. Having done some amateur development on other platforms as well, Thunkable has it’s issues, but as they work through the bugs I find it to be a much more rapid development environment than anything else I use. I still have to debug those platforms, plus there’s more of my human mistakes involved with typing and syntax etc that also get in the way and take even longer to work through than Thunkable. Thunkable is becoming a very powerful and rapid development IDE. Plus it works better for the way my brain works, which is also very helpful. It helps reduce the complexity and therefore allows me to focus on other areas.
You do have to understand some basic developer lingo and idiosyncrasies. It’s also still a young platform and that has it’s inherent downsides, but they are getting to a better platform every day.
2 Likes