Best Practices for Notekeeping?

Community Resources
1

How do you all keep track of how you made your apps?

I have steadily been adding features to my app and am running into the issue of walking away for a few days and finding that when I return to Glide I have little memory of how and why I set many things up. (Let alone the time I took a two-week break and then pretty much had to relearn e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g)

I am typically a tinker-until-it-works builder, and back a lifetime ago when I was programming a lot of html/web I would just constantly add comments into my code explaining different sections. With Glide I try to put as much as I can into column names, but there’s no equivalent to coding where I can write myself notes explaining how I solved each single issue and why each column exists.

I could painstakingly screenshot every inch of my app and type notes all over the shots, or I could spend an hour making a screencapture video where I talk myself through the entire app’s architecture and reasoning (quick, before I forget!)

Is there a best practice for this or a tool that all the techies are already savvy to?

4 Likes
2

Great question. Closest I’ve come is comments in the Google Sheet but I would love to have comments against columns in the Data Editor too since that’s actually where most of my logic is.

3 Likes
3

+1 for Google Sheet comments/notes. Even though it makes for ugly column headers, sometimes I’ll include the notes in Glide Data Editor. For example, if I want an if-then-else to display the user’s email address if they’ve completed their profile, I’ll title my column ifProfileComplete>userEmail or if relating an email address to a photo library form response sheet, I’ll name the column rel_email>photos

3 Likes
4

Ditto. Horrid.

5

I’ve gotten into the habit of making the first line of my rich text components a descriptive HTML comment.
This helps to remind me what it’s for, and also provides a good visual clue in the components list.

1 Like
6

Like a code comment eh? Those are helpful.

7

Yeah, it’s especially useful when I’ve used CSS. So for example:

<!-- Progress Bar -->
<pre><span><style>
	#app-root div[opacity='1'] {
	content: ""; 
	color: transparent; 
	display: block;
	height: 45px;
	background-image: url("https://storage.googleapis.com/glide-prod.appspot.com/uploads-v2/1nGgitAV2hL5fF2nQzRE/pub/IMAGE_ID.png");
	background-size: 260px 20px;
	background-repeat: no-repeat;
	background-position: 55% 45%;
}

Having that first line there tells me immediately what that’s for, without having to read any further.

4 Likes
8

I think it would depend on how often your building different apps or how often you modify a single app. I have about 3 notebooks and a tablet that has my notes and artwork in them, I build roughly 2 to 3 concept apps a day in Glide before they go into actual production as a dedicated app so notes in the sheets doesn’t really help me unless the app remains a Glide app.

2 Likes
9

i added a sheet / tab where i put my dev notes, links, ideas, checklist, etc… that way it is right in the app and i can add to it while say meeting with client and reviewing changes, improvements, You can only display the tab if the signed in user is yourself

5 Likes
10

I have an admin section in my app where I put my to-do list and completed changes list. I don’t have any notes of changes or functionality, but an idea would be to add rich text components on your screens to hold notes and then changed the component visibility so it’s not visible.

3 Likes
11

Thanks All, this is so super helpful!

I didn’t even think to add commenting into the rich text components. I’ve only just started adding some html/css into those since I read somewhere that it’s not officially supported? But comments are so basic I don’t see those ever breaking…

I like the idea of using the Google sheet, and especially coming up with a better more consistent naming structure for headers like @Robert_Petitto’s example.

I’m only exploring one app for now so my Glide skills are not becoming hard-wired from practice. I recently figured out how to create an admin section and I immediately started rich-text-labelling everything I put into it, which is when I realized how much I was missing that functionality across all the tabs. (My app building to-do notes live inside Apple’s Notes app on the cloud - I use the checkmark format so that I can check everything off as I solve it)

I’m going to start playing with all these suggestions - much appreciated!! :slight_smile:

3 Likes