Seeking community input on an upcoming "AppJam" Office Hour for helping new Creators

AppSheet Announcements
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Hello AppSheet Community!

In early November Rich Ellis and I will hosting an upcoming “AppJam” Office Hours event where we will be focusing on reviewing the slightly more complex tasks in AppSheet - that can often cause new creators to stumble or get confused in their initial trials of AppSheet.

For this reason we’d love to hear from the community on what topics you’d like to see covered in our upcoming session.

So far, we’ve discussed a few possible topics:

  • Creating and managing references
  • Managing role-based access
  • Customizing your app UI
  • How to manage images in your app
  • App Debugging
  • …

…but we’d really like to hear from the community on this, so please let us know what you’d like to see and we’ll plan the session around the most popular requested topics!

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That’s a great initiative! Thanks @cschalk_ws

From my point of view, the more complex part is about creating a PDF then accessing it from the app.

Even if for advanced app creators it comes to a sense, it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to put it all together.

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Good idea!

  • +1 on the importance of references and how it makes so many features much easier to build. Include talking about dereferences in there too.
  • In the same realm, touching on the concept of data normalization and its importance might be a good intermediate topic. Particularly how it relates to references and many-to-one relations, but maybe not so much the specific rules of, say, 3NF.
  • Reference actions!
  • The difference between when App Formulas evaluate in real vs virtual columns.
  • Following the above; performance considerations.
  • The concept of context. Like the point made in this post. And how THISROW works.
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I second @Marc_Dillon 's emphasis on techniques that help an app creator get an app’s foundation correct from the outset so as to streamline ongoing development effort, optimize app performance, and enable data scalability.

Consider also addressing effective use of the community forum.

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Nice initiative @cschalk_ws and team and useful suggestions by all community colleagues.

My suggestion is an extension of the points touched by @Marc_Dillon on app performance

An app creator sooner than later deals with app sync times. So you may want to cover the topic of tips on creating a “sync time efficient app” - there are a few subtopics within this main topic:

  1. Judicial use of virtual columns

  2. How to analyze app performance for slow steps (VCs) with performance analyzer.

  3. Use of security filters for limiting the rows in app device being loaded (and security filters behavior with spreadsheet vs with RDBMS)

  4. Other miscellaneous points that make app sync performance better.

All the above points have been discussed in the community and help articles as well. A cohesive discussion will be useful to app creators.

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User permissions and role / team management would be a big one. I’m still shocked that this hasn’t been built into the app editor yet.

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I think those topics are quite necessary. I have a few suggestions:

  1. Please let the app creator add, remove and edit the app users inside the app.
  2. Create Buttons in the middle of the view and add actions to it, not only the Primary and Lateral ones we have now.
  3. Create short videos, 10-15 seconds is enough by now.
  4. More rounded borders for dashboard view
  5. New format rule option, change background color
  6. Create a selec all option when we are multiselection things in the app
  7. refresh the Syncing gif animation, this squared dots are really outdated and ugly
  8. Let the user change his app color individually so which one can have their app black or white by preference.

These are some of the things that I have been saying on and on. Please listen to us, listen to the community.

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A good idea would be for the creation part to be truly multilingual and the A.I. For the formulas too, I personally use Google
Chrome and when I start translating the page it leaves a lot to be desired.
greetings to all

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You can use this:

Appsheet Translate - Chrome Web Store

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I think you could talk about app white label, how to get the apk and the IOS file and submit it to the app store and playstore, how about the prices people will pay etc.

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To just add to what @Marc_Dillon @dbaum & @Suvrutt_Gurjar have said. Us experienced Devs advise all the time about not using virtual columns unless you have to. But sometimes even we use them as a “temporary fix” that often becomes permanent.

Maybe what beginners need to know is how to convert a virtual column into a ‘normal’ column? Either by an action on save or a bot.

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Few suggestions from my side

  1. 2024 Roadmap. What is Appsheet working on, feature etc. What can we expect to see from Appsheet in 2024. I would love to me view type options. I think a matrix view similar to a pivot table would be a industry-changer for many.
  2. There is a lot of preview features that have been in preview for a long time now. I understand that the Desktop environment will be in preview for a while, but other preview options like “Filters” have been in preview for such a long time now. I would love to know when they will be polished and finalized. Just seems that pace of development has slowed down significantly in the last year or so. Sometimes feels like there is more bugs now then there was in the past.
  3. Probably more than 80% of the community communication is on support on expressions. When will AI tools similar to the “Co-pilot” experience coming to the app editor, so that we really progress from “Low-Code” to “No-Code”
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