I’m Kate, a product manager at Bubble focused on modernizing our editor interface. I’m excited to share that we’ve released more than two dozen small but meaningful “quality of life” improvements in response to feedback we’ve heard — especially from avid Bubble devs!
Here are the changes we’re most excited to highlight:
The Share Buttons element from the AddToAny Share Buttons plugin now includes X as an option. Previously, the AddToAny Share Buttons plugin included buttons for email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. Now, we’ve added X to the list of options!
Add a canvas placeholder to link elements. Instead of displaying the link element’s expression, you can add a canvas placeholder to specify what the input should look like in the editor.
Customize the duration of the user session for magic links. Previously, magic links did not allow users to specify session duration. Now, you can set the duration to be 365 days (“yes”) or 24 hours (“no”).
Build faster with improved defaults across multiple elements. Anytime you add an element to a page, they come with certain defaults as a starting point. Now, new group elements, repeating groups, text elements, and buttons elements will default to shorter heights. New group elements and repeating groups will also default to the column layout.
Create unlimited style variables. Larger and more complex apps can easily require more than 32 style variables — the previous limit before we removed this cap. Now you can create as many as you need!
Resize the issue checker. The default size of the issue checker window is now larger, and you can resize it however you want. This is particularly helpful when you have a long list of issues that you want to see all at once.
Flyouts open and close 2X faster. As you edit properties in the property editor, the flyouts that open when you do things like ”Do a search for” move 2X faster — saving you time when developing.
Privacy checkboxes are now left-aligned. We heard you on this one! Check out the privacy rules in the data tab for a more user-friendly layout.
Find all notes more easily in the notes panel. After you open any note in the editor, you can easily navigate to all other notes via the View all button in the notes panel.
Search for table elements. We released table elements last July, and now you can use the search tool to locate them in your app.
You can find the full list of changes in the Bubble release notes. We’ll continue to add improvements like these to our product roadmap, so please submit and upvote requests on the Bubble Ideaboard.
Up next on our editor modernization roadmap is a refresh of the elements tree, which is entering private beta soon. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the new changes in the comments below. Thanks!
A step in the right direction. Would we have an option to set default properties (height, width, margins and so on)? Or that’s more a part of Component Library evolution (we’ve been promised to be able to create our own components in the future)?
That’s cool! Now for property editor please
yes, yes and yes
what I’m missing here is full text search through notes
This is great Would it be possible if in the settings / styles we could adjust the defaults for certain elements? For example, I never use fixed widths or heights for any element, ever. I either have fit width to content on or off (in fact, fix widths are rarely the right design choice.)
If I could from the settings or styles tab, set certain defaults for element types…
This way, my buttons could be already how I like them (as wide as the text inside of them). This could be really useful, and for way more than buttons! It would save me a large fraction of development time, since every time I create an element I have to setup the element the same way every time…
Like the others said, it would be great if we can adjust the defaults. i also never use fixed height/width. most of the time i create the groups in the elements tree so i can choose which layout i want but the height and width is preset with xx px value of the element inside and i always have to clear that value. would be great if we can disable these presets.
I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time, hope to see big impromements
This makes life way easier
I did notice popouts opening way faster and that is definitely a big tile saver
Cant wait to check out the rest of these updates but it sounds like this hit the spot!
THANK YOU for taking the time to do these! I know they’re probably low on the priority list, but they make a HUGE DIFFERENCE for us developers, and the impact of that is much much bigger than most probably realize!!
great. thanks!
please do this atleast 4 times a year.
if you check twitter there is a whole list of quality of life improvements people continuously request.
and sorry to say but it is the same improvements since 5 years.
if you did just 10 user interviews with developers you would find this list quickly.
thanks so much for number 4. i literally asked for this for 2 years. as did many devs. this will save SO much time. because of this alone i was faster with old responsive engine than with new one.
things that come to mind
if you rename a field in the database view, it jumps to the top. very annoying if you want to rename 100 fields for naming conventions.
option sets sometimes can be a list of 100 things. reordering them is a huge pain. make it easy to reorder them. eg a make 1st button.
often adding an item to the test database manually in the datatab views means it will not show up. unless you refresh the entire page (refresh database not enough)
editing a reusable does not open a new tab. you lose all things you opened in current tab. a button edit in new tab next to edit would work.
I fully agree with Tass. It’s really nice to see the improvements; however, knowing it literally took only two days to fix all these leaves me with a bittersweet taste. We have waited for years for these improvements to happen and have asked dozens of times.
I’m grateful. I just hope that you keep doing this often and that we don’t have to wait a bunch of months (or years) for the next set of QOL improvements.
Love this from the Bubble team. Like others expressed, some of these QOL improvements should have been tackled way before.
Would love the bubble team to keep pushing out these seemingly easy wins often! They improve the daily experience in bubble. Spending 8 hours a day on bubble, resizing the issue tracker would have been nice years agoooo lol
@kate.mcnally this is fantastic news! I’ve been asking/moaning about the fact that the past way of tackling these (24 hackathons by Bubble team) stopped. These types of small improvements go a long way, not just for our development, but our trust in Bubble remaining focused on improving the platform based on user feedback.
A couple of things:
How often will Bubble commit to doing these things? As others have mentioned, some of these have been years overdue. Is Bubble going to commit to tackling the ideas on the idea board more frequently, like once a month to help spice up the monthly community update?
Is it possible to get a list of all the ‘more than 2 dozen’ quality of life improvements…it is kind of difficult to read through the release notes and comprehend what much of any of it might actually mean.
Maybe the next round of quality of life improvements could include making the release notes a bit more human readable - or add a tab to be ‘quality of life improvements’ at the top of the page so we can tab between New Features, Release Notes and Quality of Life Improvements.
I’d love to just read through a comprehensive list to see everything easily and understand with more clarity on what the improvements were so that I can know what is now available to make use of, big or small.
Could you possibly release a public roadmap of upcoming features. It helps to know if something is being actively worked on. We’re happy you’re listening but I’m still afraid this kind of quality of life update might not happen for another year.
THANK YOU for these updates. Annnnnnd I agree 1000% with @TipLister and @pheredia24 and everyone else who is a little grumpy about how long it took to prioritize these QOL updates when they clearly could have been addressed very quickly.
The longer small issues like this (and all the ones Tass listed + hundreds more we’ve all begged for for years) go unaddressed, the more our faith in this platform is eroded.
These are not just small annoyances that kind of bug us a little. These issues are present all day long, every single day. We think about them constantly, because there is no way to avoid them. Literally every few seconds, we are confronted with one or more of these paper cuts. Imagine getting an actual paper cut every few seconds. No one would just sit with that for long. Bubble cannot expect this level of loyalty when there are other options.
Again, I am SO SO SO HAPPY about this little sprint. THANK YOU. And I hope leadership will take seriously what folks are saying here and do this much more often.
Would it be possible if in the settings / styles we could adjust the defaults for certain elements? For example, I never use fixed widths or heights for any element, ever. I either have fit width to content on or off (in fact, fix widths are rarely the right design choice.)
Awesome little update
