Has Glide gotten too complex and less beginner friendly?

Here’s one “Home” tab example, I have more inline lists below.

I get that the search bar only appears at the top and sticks there instead of letting you drag it wherever you want, but at the moment that works for me.

1 Like

RE: Search. Yes, hidden at top, doesn’t count results. Functions good though. Fast

RE: Podz, Courses lists. Where would a user selectable filter go in this case? It seems the user has no input needed?

Maybe I come from too much of a Marketplace and Classifieds background, requiring simple user selectable filters.

We don’t need to beat this horse dead. Hopefully these ideas illustrate the builder centric focus I mentioned anyways. Good discussion regardless.

1 Like

I was talking only about the search function since I do not need the user to filter anything in that case.

I hate all these new feature releases because it means less workarounds :rofl:. I remember a time when a user specific column was alien to us regular Gliders (not Glide). Those who had joined prior to us had been pushing Glide for this feature. As beginner, when it was finally relesed, I was like what the hell, and how do I use it? Next, user profile (which I savaged), then actions (I did not hide my feeling by having a good go at Glide, in this very forum), then the new builder (I needed a run down the pub), then webhooks (that I thought was oversold as a feature release); then some 67 plugins (I cried until I realised their importance). Latest is Pages. I am loving it not because it is easy (which it is} but because of its visual appeal. I am grateful to my “ancestors” for having pushed Glide, when they did and for the reasons they did, because today life as a glide developer for me is so much easier and fun. I want the next generation of Gliders to build better and more complex apps/site than I or anyone ever could. I will always be grateful to all the names mentioned for getting us what they did.

I would ideally like to see this thread devoted to our beginner friends so Glide could learn and respond. Therefore, I am staying out of this thread.

Thank you.

12 Likes

This topic and discussion is a sign that the innovation just needs refocusing to rounding out concepts, workflows, and components. This is healthy and natural. The growing list of complex features like true search won’t stop. Product, design, and development will define new pricing and packaging models supported by new teams with slightly different goals and incentives. Having talked with David just once, I’m sure Glide is having these kinds of discussions. If you like analogies, think meiosis vs. mitosis.

For Beginners?
I’ve personally enjoyed learning and the journey. Glide has been a bridge for me to learn more advanced programming concepts. I’d classify myself as an advanced beginner now:-). I also think it’s much easier today for beginners to achieve more complex apps!

Keep it up Glide!

7 Likes

Great thread with some really interesting opinions.

I have both founded and grown tech companies in the past. Without a doubt you need innovation within your user base, the ones that really push the product, in order to make it easier for those joining the party later on. As @Wiz.Wazeer says he is “grateful for his ancestors”.

Failing to listen to (most of) these innovators is a mistake and luckily Glide are great at listening. That is why their product is the best it gets right now. Seriously. And they should be proud for that.

If I had one criticism it would be the need to revisit existing functionality from time to time in order to keep it current. That’s a discipline in itself when you’re growing, but also essential. So they have to balance internal genius with external innovation, whilst also keeping business as usual “current”, all with a small team.

I think they do a pretty good job :grinning:

8 Likes

A little example where I think Glide could make steps for beginners (and for all of us).
I have a sheet where I collect ideas for products or services. I make a one-pager for every idea in which I have columns like

  • Header
  • Subheader
  • Description
  • Benefit 1
  • Benefit 2
  • Benefit 3
  • Review 1
  • Review 2
  • Review 3
  • FAQ 1
  • FAQ 2
  • FAQ 3
  • Call To Action

To me it feels logical to have this all in one sheet with a row per idea. All info per idea combined.

I thought, lets make my first Glide Page where I show all ideas in nice-looking one pagers and give people the option to add their own ideas / one-pagers via a dedicated form.

I was a little rusty so I thought: I have all data in a logical way in a spreadsheet, how hard can it be? In an hour I should have it done.

Hours later (and thanks to help from the community) I know again what I should have done. But that’s because I already know about relations and could refresh my rusty knowledge.

To get what I wanted, in the end I needed to do this:

  • Split one sheet into 4 sheets (Onepagers / Benefits / Reviews / FAQs)
  • Make a lot of relations and lookups between all sheets.
  • Use collections to get the nice-looking rows of 3 with images I wanted.

Because I was rusty myself, it did raise the question: wouldn’t it be great if something like this could be done easier? For example: Glide understands Benefit 1 Benefit 2 and Benefit 3 is a collection, Review 1, Review 2 and Review 3 is a collection. So if I want to publish a collection I can choose one of the collections Glide recognizes in my row?

There must be all sorts of reasons why this isnt a good idea, but these are my 2 cents as an example that there is a lot to be won imho.

1 Like

I’m very much a Glide beginner, though I’ve done a good deal of amateur programming and in my day was an HCI researcher. I agree that there is good support for specifics, but a lack of slightly longer examples; at the start I found it very hard to get anywhere.

How could the Glide documentation fill this gap? Here’s one way. For my own use I produced a few little teaching things. Glide 101 describes the very basics. Glide 102 is called ‘make a new data table and compute a formula’ and shows how to make a book data table with columns for book title, weight, price, and number of pages, with a form for entering new books and a screen to display average weight, individual price per page fo each book, and a donut chart. Other little teaching things include a basic relations example, a demo of bar charts, etc. In each case I describe how to build the app from scratch. These are short documents with screen clips rather than videos: I can read MUCH faster than someone can talk, so I get impatient with videos, but that’s just my predilection.

Each of these little examples is a complete tiny app demonstrating one feature. My belief is that other beginners would find such things useful. As I said, I produced these entirely for my own use, but I can make them freely available as suggestions for similar teaching documents produced by people who actually know what they’re doing, unlike me.

I should end this by saying that I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of Glide: well done the company and the community.

7 Likes

I don’t think it’s too complex for beginners, as someone who’s gotten the grips of a lot of it in a couple of days with no techy experience. Though they’re really lacking on some good user guides. I guess there’s not many community posts either, like you get with Bubble, but that’s probably because Bubble is 100x more complicated.

With SEARCH, it seems that it doesn’t search inline lists with Relation fields. Is this correct or is there a workaround here?

Do you mean you want to search for an item in a relation with the search bar?

No. What they should do tho is give me API access. I think that is holding me back from using it as a real product for an MVP.

I was told you need to may 6000 a year for that. I think that is not appropriate and we should be given a trial person before committing to that

@Cathleen_Turner please send an email to sean@heyglide.com and tell him what you’re building.

1 Like

I’d be interested in seeing what you have. And I suspect that @JackVaughan may be interested as well.

I think a great innovation for everyone would be to add “proactive” help.

I mean, when working on the GDE, to be able to come up with explanatory texts when hovering over a layout, a component, a button, even… everything on the GDE.

It would be very useful for beginners who don’t know, for example, that layouts have different functionalities and limitations.

I do not think that this work would be considerable since the texts would be taken directly from the documentation which is already written in a very concise manner. Maybe @JackVaughan can tell us if it’s easily doable…

2 Likes

Hi Darren, thanks for your interest. I’m happy to make my examples freely available, but given that you’re a certified expert and I’m a beginner, it would make sense for you to glance over them first to see whether I’m likely to mislead people. Only if you have time, of course.

Thomas Green

4 Likes

Sure, would be happy to take a look. Send me a PM if you like.

1 Like

Yep this is totally on our list. It’s really just a question of priorities and engineering/design resources.

I would love to do it :+1:

2 Likes

Hey there folks
I’m what would be considered a newbie of a newbie beginner lol

We wanted an app for our business and the budget just wasn’t there for it.
So, I say to myself … “then then go learn how” … a myriad of videos and a few bookmarks later I stumble on a Glide video. Hmmm… Pages?.. Glide tables? What the devil is all that? Although not having a clue, it looks enticing… Major learning curve but life is about learning.

I downloaded a template as a learning tool and to save myself months of tutorials, as we start work in a month. I’ve bumbled about and while making errors I’m beginning to learn my way … a small amount… but on the right path. The tutorials are nicely structured and I’ll be digging deeper into them as I know I’ll need the knowledge regardless.

That said, Glide is an amazing portal for a business owner like me, who has limited time, and needs to stay ahead of the competition in our industry. I think Glide will soon be a household name with the immense advantage you offer to folk like me. You have an amazing product and it’s as beginner friendly as you can get. Hey, if I can do it, then it has to be be good!

Thank you and keep up the great work… you’re all amazing!

5 Likes

@kabookie

I love this post and as a COMPLETE Glide noob, but an old “real” programmer. I really want to do EXACTLY what you are doing.

If I find a need, I’ll devote a few weekends to it and then build a community around it, until it fizzles or goes VIRAL, but I value my time and I don’t want to be ANYONE’s tech support.

But, I’m willing to pay other people to do tech support … wait … I have to write that app.

Glide really has the right leadership and everyone is in the low/no code movement even Microsoft.

It’s going to be huge, remember in Star Trek, everyone could kinda program the computer, some were specialist but anyone can say, “Hello, Computer?”.

That world is coming.

I would love to continue a dialogue and stay in-touch, with no time commitments :wink:

3 Likes

Same here. I’m thinking of building templates based on Glide and selling it also through other channels like probably Instagram and Youtube. But my concern is that since not many people have heard about Glide besides those who are interested in no-code platforms, it could be quite difficult in preaching those templates, so the potential buyers of those templates would mainly be users of Glide, which could be quite limited.