Monthly Community Update -- May 2020

StevenM · 2020-05-03T23:27:03.148Z

At last and what everyone has been waiting for! Don’t leave a vacuum for people to fill. I know many in the IT sector struggle to proactively reach out because its typically not in their nature. But you need to communicate with your customers or risk losing them. Great to see a decent and Bubble supported video chat plugin being worked on.

jennifervasilenko · 2020-05-04T07:08:58.157Z

Redesign of the editor is very exciting! Waiting

luke2 · 2020-05-04T09:13:39.463Z

Thanks for the reply Emmanuel. Understood, the approach makes sense and makes for a smoother transition. As like many other Bubblers, cant wait to get my hands on the new editor, looking great so far from screens.

Ah sorry, my mistake, I was getting a bit excited, I misquoted the following:

We’re going to work on our responsive engine in the new year

Cheers

mike_verbruggen · 2020-05-05T15:33:24.832Z

I appreciate that you embrace this transparent way of communicating.

miguel · 2020-05-05T16:07:40.025Z

All this sounds great

I haven’t seen any reference to updating apps without a refresh.

For the teams that work on the same app simultaneously, this is key. Right now, it’s impossible to work simultaneously, as any change that someone makes means that the whole team must refresh the app.

emmanuel · 2020-05-05T16:17:06.346Z

It’s on our list, but no timeline on this. If you use multiple versions though that shouldn’t be an issue if everyone has its own version.

scriptschool · 2020-05-05T16:44:44.967Z

But the multiple versions feature is simply not ready; it’s fraught with problems.

Numerous examples on the forum; your own team has acknowledged it needs improvement; and my experience with it led to days worth of repair.

Not a real reply to @miguel’s request IMO.

morgan · 2020-05-11T12:30:16.245Z

I really appreciate how open and transparent these updates are (the first I’ve actually read). It gives me much more confidence in the company. Thank you Josh & Emmanuel.

miguel · 2020-05-11T12:34:16.246Z

Hi @emmanuel.

I have just merged changes from one version into the development version, and all of a sudden I got 174 new errors (both versions had 0 errors before the merge).

Most errors are related to conditionals losing the reference to some existing elements that still exist, so I’ve had to go error by error and re-reference those elements.

I’ve had to spend half an hour fixing everything, so unfortunately I have to agree with @scriptschool. Versions are not working that well yet.

josh · 2020-05-11T16:40:08.599Z

scriptschool:

But the multiple versions feature is simply not ready; it’s fraught with problems.

Numerous examples on the forum; your own team has acknowledged it needs improvement; and my experience with it led to days worth of repair.

miguel:

I have just merged changes from one version into the development version, and all of a sudden I got 174 new errors (both versions had 0 errors before the merge).

Yes, we completely agree this feature still has a bunch of bugs with the way it handles the merges, which often creates a lot of manual work for people to reconcile things and fix problems that ideally the code would be able to handle automatically. We’re working on a project right now that should kill off a big source of them. See my the paragraph in my original post starting: “A complete rebuild of our system for doing calculations on top of application data…” I don’t know if that will get us to 100% reliability, but that should get us a lot closer, and we’ll follow up and do future work until we’re happy with the state of things.

Our overall thought is that this is a really important feature and worth investing in until it’s completely reliable. That’s why Emmanuel brought it up in response to the @miguel’s question about updating apps without a refresh: we’d rather invest in improving version control than work on an entirely new feature that tackles the multiple-people-editing problem. We understand that it’s not a satisfactory answer until the feature itself is satisfactory, but we think it makes more sense to take what we’ve already built and improve its quality than it does to spin up a new project while leaving the existing feature needing work.

mark.brisbourne · 2020-05-12T23:06:31.488Z

Thanks Josh for your update. I appreciate Bubble in these updates letting use know candidly where/why there were some issues and how that and other limitations are being address, even other enhancements we can get excited about. I think this really connects Bubble with it’s community while evolving altogether.

brad.h · 2020-05-13T01:53:49.245Z

josh:

Yes, we completely agree this feature still has a bunch of bugs with the way it handles the merges, which often creates a lot of manual work for people to reconcile things and fix problems that ideally the code would be able to handle automatically. We’re working on a project right now that should kill off a big source of them.

Thank you @josh! This would be a big help. Like everyone else, I appreciate your transparency. I’m still dealing with merge issues (merge from one Dev mode to another) and this makes me confident. Thank you

J805 · 2020-05-21T16:52:20.970Z

josh:

We’re alpha-testing a videochat plugin to make it easier to build apps that have video chat as a big component.

Hey @josh, can I get in on the alpha-testing for this? I would love to see a group video chat similar to Zoom’s capabilities. Let me know if I can get in on the testing. Thanks!

jonathan.timianko · 2020-05-21T17:28:25.402Z

@J805 No need for Alpha since it already came out!

Plugin Announcement: Video Chat New features

We are excited to announce the beta launch of the Bubble video chat plugin, powered by Twilio! Now, more than ever, it’s important to stay connected to each other. Our hope is that this plugin will help with this effort. The video chat plugin enables you to add highly-customizable video chat windows to your app, and it’s white-label, so you can make it completely your own with ease. In the time of social distancing, we hope this latest plugin will help you build virtual communities, communicate …

J805 · 2020-05-21T17:31:20.946Z

Oh, that’s right. I forgot about that one! Thanks!

GregoryKing · 2020-05-21T21:40:28.601Z

Bubble is the future of visual programming, if I haven’t said it before, I’m saying it now. I’ve tried a couple of solutions and Bubble has been by far the best in my opinion.

kaiphilip.kern · 2020-05-30T16:24:19.176Z

Any updates for plans on native app support (for the appstores?)

jonathan.timianko · 2020-05-30T16:37:40.792Z

Bubble doesn’t offer that yet natively out of the box but I listened to a podcast recently where @emmanuel says that they really hope to offer that at some point next year, and that this year is really about mastering the speed and scale of the web infrastructure.

But I think it’s best to think about it in a little bit of a different way. At the end of the day, any web app built on bubble can be reconfigured and fully packaged into a mobile application as long as its built the right way in terms of responsive design and you have a good native wrapper service to go along with it. @natedogg’s Codeless Academy just came out with a new wrapper service that is undoubtedly the best for Bubble apps right now and I highly recommend you try it.

With that said, when you are building a bubble app and combining it with a wrapper, what you are really doing is replicating the functionality offered by the Ionic Cross Platform App development framework, or PhoneGap/Apache Cordova. I don’t have exact statistics on this, but tons of app on both the App Store and Google App store are built using these frameworks because they allow for cross platform app development from one shared code base. Amazon itself is not even built in native IOS/Android code and a ton of their app’s functionality is dependent on webviews/cross platform technologies because the products on their platform change too often. There is no question you have an app on your phone right now that is architected like this.

Based on my experience building a mobile app on Bubble and with a few wrapper services the last few months, I can tell you that all of the tools that you need to create an amazing mobile app are there. Just like you I cannot wait for the day until Bubble offers a native solution out of the box as well; it will be a base that will allow those developers who are creating wrappers right now to offer even more amazing experiences in the future, but for right now the best thing to do if you haven’t been doing it already is to just get going on building your app!

mhclapperton · 2020-06-06T21:17:18.859Z

Is there a way to get early access to the CSV uploader? I have a Customer table that has 60,000 records and a purchases table with 700,000 records.

I have the professional plan but I suspect upping my plan isn’t the issue.

HELP! I have a launch schedule and I’m at my witts end

eve · 2020-06-07T21:10:43.432Z

Please check out this thread [Recruiting for Alpha] Large CSV data imports for information on signing up for the alpha release of the Large CSV imports feature!