Has anyone else noticed that it’s @muneer’s cake day?
This got me wondering about what can be done after a year using Thunkable.
I’d love to hear from folks in the Community about what the most important things you’ve learned so far on your Thunkable journey are?
Whether you’ve been here for 365 days (or more!) like Muneer, or you’re a user who signed up in the last 365 hours, what were the “wow” moments or the “aha” moments in the platform that you still find useful?
Was it something like how to group or layer components in the UI? Or learning what a variable is for the first time? Or did you figure out how APIs work and you’ve been able to reuse this skill many times since?
I’ve learned that writing values to labels is a good idea when debugging, and that testing on all three platforms in essential, if the layout is at all fussy.
Learning APIs and Firebase integration were power tools for me as a developer.
As far as tips, I think using a vibrate block and/or wait block at strategic points in my code to give me a tangible idea of where I am in the long list of blocks while my project is running.
If I have a vibrate block, for example, and I don’t feel the phone vibrate then I know the code never made it to that section and I can start to figure out why. I can move the vibrate block up in my list of blocks and see where it does work and then that helps me narrow down the problem area.
Happy Thunkaversary @muneer! Wish you many more years of Thunking and making cool apps!
I’ve learned a lot from the Community, so it’s hard to find where to start.
I’ve got a couple:
1: Always conduct error handling, especially when dealing with APIs or something as slippery. If you’re dealing with lists/ make lists from text, then it’s always good to add a list viewer to your screen for testing purposes.
2: Learning to use objects with JSON/ Lists/Variables is good, as they can come really handy sometimes. Before I knew about them, I used to create multiple stored variables to store each separate item the user filled out on the profile page. Now, I use one stored variable containing an object, that stores all the data.
3: If any of your screens are set to scrollable, it’s best to set its vertical alignment to ‘top’.
4: Get hold of the DVL! Data Viewer Lists and Grids are probably the best components on Thunkable (according to me). Nearly every single one of my apps has them. They’re efficient ways to store and display data, both locally and from external sources. The best part is, you can make your own custom layouts, to display your data exactly the way you want!
I’ve got more, but I’ve forgotten them😂 So until I remember them, here’s the 5th one:
5: Keep Thunking! If you ever have a problem, don’t hesitate to ask in the Community!
First of all thanks for starting the post with my cake day, this made my first smile of the day. Thank you all.
I was introduced to Thunkable in May 2020 when I was contracted by owners of a supermarket (with couple of branches) to develop a “Point Rewarding System”. At that time, I do not know that Thunkable exists, to my surprise, it was a condition of the contract to develop the app/apps in Thunkable for ease of maintenance and cross platform (Android and iOS). I accepted the challenge and signed for Thunkable and I was amazed of myself. I delivered the app (2 apps) to the client is about 4 months. That was really amazing which proved to me that Thunkable has a very short learning curve and could be the answer to many coders.
This was developed entirely by cloud variables and the other app was developed by the Firebase blocks.
Since then I’m in love with the platform and encourage others to use it and help to find ways to the issues they post here in the community. I give introduction short courses for my village young guys to start coding in Thunkable and provide them with Arabic explanation of most of the components.
Tips time
one of the best tips I learn while developing the “Point Rewarding System” is not to use the cloud variables in loops or test conditions. Use them to retrieve the info from your database and then use app variables to manage the values.
Another tip is not to assign a cloud variable directly to a text_input field. For some reason, what ever you type will be immediately stored to the database.
