An Appeal to the Community at Large

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
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Dear Community Members,

One of the things that sets AppSheet ahead of its competition is this Community. I have been involved with AppSheet apps for over two years and felt the importance of this Community from day one.

All of you do a great job posting your questions and problems and the others are excellent at responding, discussing and even solving issues. Believe it or not, for those who are just reading the posts, simply following the discussion is a tremendous benefit to better understanding the system and learning new or different ways to build features into our apps. Please continue posting and responding!!

However…(you knew it was coming)… AppSheet also depends on our input to help guide them forward. A company cannot KNOW what application features are needed. They need input from the industries. AppSheet is one of very few companies I have felt is truly interested in what its customers want and need. Certainly AppSheet has its own master plan for the future but they also have an invested interest to fold in the issues and suggestions we developers raise in the Community. They spend a lot of time and effort to extract that information from us but they ultimately depend on our input on the Bug posts and Feature Requests to help prioritize those items into their master plan.

So, I appeal to you, the Community Members, to not just post and respond to the General questions. Also, review daily the Bugs and Feature Requests. When a posted issue is also impacting (or has impacted) you, note that with a reply on the post. If you agree that a listed Feature Request would be helpful to you and your apps, apply a vote on it and reply to the post if you have anything to add. This doesn’t mean to start replying on every post. Just those that you can meaningfully contribute to from experience or have information to share.

By helping AppSheet understand what it is we need in our apps, we help them prioritize what’s needed in the development Industry but most of all…we help ourselves. Otherwise, we get what is THOUGHT as needed.

Good luck with your apps and keep posting!

John Baer
Willow Mobile Systems

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Thanks @WillowMobileSystems! I agree. Even though there are hundreds and hundreds of people who participate in this forum to some extent, many posts go without comment. I’m sometimes surprised at how little reaction constructive posts get.

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Yes. One of the first things I do when I get on the Community each day is look for any post that has not yet had a reply. If I feel I can help then I try to.

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I totally agree with you. I will keep posting and reading!

Thanks you for posting your comments to remind the importance of the community.

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Since this post was about the importance of posting, I wanted to highlight the Creator Leaderboard. It a menu option at the top of this page. It shows each member in the Community and their inter-activity. No, not as a competition but just so you can compare your level inter-activity with that of others. Also, you can see how active you really have been… it might be more or it might be less than you think.

Maybe we should have a competition? What do you think?

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As @tsuji_koichi knows well, in Japanese there is an expression that goes something like this: If you praise a pig, it will even climb a tree for you.

Recently, the encouragement from the leaderboard has turned me into a pig climbing a tree. I don’t know how long I can keep it up but watching the numbers has been fun for me.

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「豚もおだてりゃ木に登る」

This expression is well explaining the last case where you asked me to prepare the sample for the custom landing page stuffs. haha. I just worked for you and for community, friends. As far as I m required, I will do the best to contribute. I see and m happy you use GIF file quite a lot these days! It will surely improve your skills, no matter what.

This is just out of my opinion. Putting the fact beside I m working and acting as Appsheet partner.

Appsheet community is quite exceptional for me. There are bunch of community I have been engaged, but it turned out to be outstanding one.

I m using Appsheet almost for years, but initially it was surely run by Appsheet, off course, but it is natural. However, as the time goes by, loads of community members are heavily involved and answering to question, even before the guys in Seattle wakes up! In the true sense, the Appsheet community is run by “community”.

For various stuffs, it is true we need a direct support from Appsheet members who are most knowledgeable to tackle the problems. I went to Seattle last week and learned now team is growing upto almost 50 members, while it was 15 years back. I m not proud of myself for anything at all, but it should be true the new appsheet team member is also learning from community as well.

For me, once the appsheet team member can concentrate more over the things and something “innovative” stuffs, it is just benefit to us. We can enjoy constantly the new features. I know Aleksi is working hard to contribute to the community, but he may feel the number of the questions has been asked by someone from community before he tacked with them. (The community is growing the number of the community member is increasing, so simple math does not say anything though).

Actually Appsheet worked (and working) for me as game changer. It brought great opportunity to push my business forward in the positive way. On the day one, I have utterly no idea how Appsheet works, so posted loads of questions, and got support to well understand how Appsheet works in various aspects.
So it is kinda of give and take for me, as well as engaging in the community is just keep me up what the latest and what the tricks and what the tips, just to learn more.

In that context, honestly, i dont care how much “like this” mark and score I and we get. Most importantly, it should be important how we solve the problem others have and how we contribute the growth of the community.

I m almost doing and using Appsheet as main core of my own business, so the prospect could be different from others, but the growth of Appsheet is in turn growth of my own business.

Just as one of opinion, I appreciate and respect other opinions as always.

In the meantime, this community plat form is run by Discourse, no Appsheet is using third party tool to run community; It has score boards, but it is just a native and default feature available on this platform, I dont think Appsheet encourage the engagement for competition. If they do, then i may keep leave from here, haha.

It is nothing to do with competition stuffs, but I have been wondering if Appsheet introduce tire system in terms of the partner… On the appsheet page, the partner are listed, but just a list. Not sure how some of other partner is actively working on or not. Introduction of Gold, silver, bronze partner kinds system could help my business!, but all upto Appsheet and their decision as it is also how to gauge it.

Koichi

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Thanks again for sharing that app:

[Create Custom Home View or Landing Page](https://community.appsheet.com/t/create-custom-home-view-or-landing-page/16664/17) Tips & Tricks ?

@praveen @Fabian @Grant_Stead @Suvrutt_Gurjar @Peter @TDhers @carie @morgan @Phil @Santiago I created Sample App and put on my portfolio, this is link to it. https://www.appsheet.com/samples/Sample-App?appGuidString=70d2ae91-3ce9-4195-a8b6-fa5a5fc7e024 Hoping this will be found useful by the community. I will place another sample app and add to my portfolio for sharing tips and tricks. Stay tuned!!

Before you shared it, I finally figured out how to put an animated gif on Google drive and access it in a way in which AppSheet utilize the animation. This is surprisingly tricky. Even in the app @tsuji_koichi has kindly shared with us, the gif URL doesn’t seem to work outside of the app, though it’s great inside it. GIFs are tricky but hold a good deal of promise in AppSheet, I think.

Thanks again for that great lesson, @tsuji_koichi, and for your thoughtful comments here.

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As I said, more than welcome!

We should discuss and talk this sort of stuffs in somewhere Izakaya with Sake, which does fit the best!

BOOOO! （Japanese pig barks like this)

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See, gifs are hard. Your gif isn’t moving.

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True!

The easiest way is to place your movie files to Giphy.com.
To create account, it is default. Free.
Then get the access url.
Then paste to Appsheet.
It works.

We will be free from headache of Google drive tricks etc.

Very simple and easy. You did not, please try.
You gif file will be hosted on the Cloud, and will not make your local computer and hardware dirty.

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In addition to GIf, 360 deg pic and movie is more fun!!!

[New Data Type - Embed Code](https://community.appsheet.com/t/new-data-type-embed-code/17161) Feature Requests

There will be tons of use-cases I can imagine, but I wish to get the new data type for column setting. A temporary name I call as “Embed”. Once this is selected, then we are able to put the embed code available anywhere. These days, it is kind of “default” that any web service to provide embed code so that the user can place the work of app in somewhere else. Youtube provide Embed to share. Even the whole or part web page could be embed into the Appsheet column. There are loads of discussion…

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I tried Giphy.com and, as you say, it worked very well – it was much easier than Google drive. I think I’ll use this in the future.

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Since the gif issue isn’t directly related to @WillowMobileSystems original post, I’ll refrain from continuing this thread here. I’ve written another comment here:

[Create Custom Home View or Landing Page](https://community.appsheet.com/t/create-custom-home-view-or-landing-page/16664/18) Tips & Tricks ?

@tsuji_koichi and I wound up discussing this on another thread. I’m migrating that discussion here for the benefit of others interested in using animated Gifs. At @tsuji_koichi’s recommendation, I signed up for Giphy.com and uploaded a gif to try out on a little app of mine. Just has @tsuji_koichi said, it worked well. I was surprised to find out, as well, that the gif will continue to work on my app after I erase it from Giphy.com. I guess AppSheet is brining the animated gif into the serv…

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HI

I am new to AppSheet and just want to set up a membership form and take a small payment. Is this possible and how much would it cost?

S

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No competitions thanks. I just do what I can.

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Welcome to AppSheet! I think this question is best posed in a new post. Not many community members will see it here.

Yes it is possible. There are no payments integrations available (yet! a wink at AppSheet) in AppSheet but you can use Webhooks from an AppSheet app to create your own integration with a payment service.

Cost? This will depend a lot on the complexity of the app and what you are trying to accomplish. This is a community of AppSheet app creators. It is better to contact AppSheet directly to get an answer to this question.

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Yeah. I was only half way serious about a competition. More like a friendly game to try to bond and drum up activity. Really was just an idea to enhance the livelihood within the community.

I learn a lot from others here and I am NOT a newcomer to app development - I still learn tons. There are really only a handful of users that bounce ideas off each other. I would like to see more members get involved with that. I feel we need a way to draw more members into the “circle”. So I thought if we could weave in some fun amongst our serious app development posts, we could attract and retain more members.

The larger the community the stronger and more resourceful it will become. That is something that serves all of us well.

AppSheet has taken strides to get feedback from us and has made changes. But us users can also do some things strengthen the bond amongst ourselves.

Any suggestions?

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I don’t have any good suggestions but I also really appreciate the community. It’s great to get feedback to questions and ideas here.

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Time to pop this back to the top for the newcomers to see!