This is just offered as feedback. Your product is great but learning it is torture. Your videos go much too fast. I had to replay one snippet a dozen times to learn techniques like connecting a spreadsheet to an app and I still have no idea how to do it. What is wrong with a comprehensive text-based step-by-step manual?
And what’s wrong with menus? I’d like a big fat one on top of the site with lots of drop downs so I can orient myself without opening a dozen screens trying to find things. I get lost all the time.
You don’t have to hire a high-priced user interface professional to fix things. Just ask your grandmother to create an app with your system. I think you’ll see what I’m ranting about.
Thank you for the feedback. There is nothing wrong with writing tutorials as long-form text, and everyone learns differently. We are just a very small team (we have no employee dedicated to writing tutorials) and our platform is changing so rapidly (we’re just about a year old) that long-form written tutorials get outdated almost as soon as they are written.
Thank you for your patience, though. We hope you become a paying customer so we can afford a documentation team and some grandmother UX tests!
Also, you mention that you are still struggling to learn the technique of connecting a spreadsheet to an app? What do you mean by this? Your app is connected to your spreadsheet when you pick the spreadsheet as you are creating the app for the first time. There is no technique involved. Is this unclear?
Furthermore, Makerpad is a site whose entire business is helping you learn tools like Glide. They have long-form text tutorials on creating apps with Glide alone: https://www.makerpad.co/company/glide
Sadly, as I said, Glide is changing very rapidly, so many of their tutorials will be out of date in places.
There are so many things I don’t understand I’d never get finished posting questions here. For example why do my images look like images in list view, but show just URLs in detail view? But that’s only one of hundreds of things I’m struggling with.
I’ll have a look at the Makerpad site. First I’ve ever heard of it!
Images will look like links in details view because Glide automatically assigned the image to a text component. Delete it, create an image component and assign it your image column…you’ll see the image now appear. If you want, I’d be happy to show you around the app tomorrow if you want to do a zoom meeting or the like.
Not happy to find that Makerpad charges for tutorials. I have a client that I’m working with on spec. I can’t test out your system without learning how to use it and I can’t learn to use it without paying for it. It will take me a lot longer to create a demo site that I may never get paid for all because you guys can’t explain yourselves. Not impressed at all…
We go to great lengths to make videos and write documentation to explain how to use Glide. This particular issue of adding an image to a details screen is explained explicitly in our documentation and in several of our videos. We make Glide available for free. We created this forum full of volunteers who offer to help you on a video call, for free. You’re not impressed at all?
I appreciate your quick replies and I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. I don’t find videos easy to learn from. I’ve learned a fair bit of web and graphic design stuff through books, where I can slow down and work through a problem in a linear fashion without bouncing around from one video to the next. The image video you referred me to was much more explicit than the one I was watching earlier, which had slightly different information. Yes, you offer the app for free but I fully intend to buy into it if I ever get confident in using it. I am much more confident reading textbooks than watching videos where you have to stop and start the playback, go back and forth to watch sections over and over again. Adobe and Apple have very thorough guides and the videos on Lynda.com are very clear and pedantic. Their material gives me confidence that I will learn something, so I will put the time in. But I felt quite discouraged trying to create my first Glide app and have been looking for other solutions.
You don’t have to pay to be able to use Glide and many of its capabilities, hopefully.
All components are quite simple to use, and their use is quite explicit, it’s my own opinion.
When you create your app, you pick a Google sheet and as a result, the Glide framework build an initial version of the app, adding some components mapped on the columns and data found in your sheet. It’s a kind of pre-init of your app, but you are free to remove this initial setup, all components added “arbitrarily” by Glide, and add the components you want : images, links, text, rich text, and so on.
I would strongly advise you to not start create your first app without playing with the numerous templates available. You can copy them and make them your own, and so you are then really able to play with them : modify component settings to discover / learn what happened, add some components are see what they’re doing, and so on.
Also, documentation and videos tutorials could be better maybe, but they are at least the best minimal source of information on how to build an app and how to grow your knowledge about Glide.
Persist! Play with templates, and you’ll be happy after this induction period!
Hi, I had no background whatsoever in any type of website development or anything similar… I am a landscaper and I have been able to learn to use many of their components, I believe that if I am able to learn from them, then you for sure will be able too. It takes time but it is fun (at least to me it is).
The learning formats may not be exactly what you were hoping for but plenty of learning material is available nonetheless, and it is free.
Try to see it as a game, as a fun thing to learn. Try to enjoy the challenges you encounter. Copy free templates then look over its spreadsheet. Do this over and over again and you will notice “patterns”. And eventually things will “make sense”.
It will not take a day or two tho (at least to me it did not lol), it may take weeks or even months (it took me months), but it is super fun for sure!
Try to watch their videos in slow motion with subtitles on:
