One Week of Using Thunable

As you may have read in my previous post, it is now something like one week that I am using Thunkable.

The start was very difficult for me. Before I am/was using Glide Apps but I made the choice to switch to Thunable. This is because I think that Thunkable has more to offer or it has potential for me.

Learning something new is not always easy. So, switching from Glide to Thunkable has its difficulties. There is a different way of thinking. Before I already heard that learning Thunkable will take time. And like everyone else, I also thought that it would not be a problem. What could be so difficult?

Boy, Am I Wrong

But I could not be more wrong. Maybe for some, it is easy to switch, but not for me.

The first tutorial I did, was easy and things worked. This is then where you make the mistake of thinking it will be easy. Then you start creating your own app. The design goes okay, but then comes the programming part.

Using blocks looks easy, but using them correctly is a different thing. Maybe it is me, but it looks like I don’t want to do things the easy way. For some reason, I always think of different ways. After the first tutorial, I wanted to recreate a previous app in Thunkable. The thing is, that in this tutorial you can see all the data. But I wanted a filtered view. I only wanted to see certain data. This is where the problems started.

Default, It is not possible to have a filtered view. You need to use blocks to program the app and tell it that you want to see different things. I posted my question in the community and was hoping someone could tell me how to do it.

YouTube

On YouTube, I found what I was trying to do. It was spread over 4 videos. The first video was an introduction. In the second he showed how to use the blocks and what should be placed in them. I thought, no problem. I followed the steps one by one. Then I did my test. Failure. Nothing happened.

I checked everything several times but I was not able to find anything wrong. I gave up.

The next day I did one more test, and to my surprise, it was working. So I thought. I had a closer look and saw that my data was double. I check everything again. Cleared some tables, but still, all my data was double. I got frustrated. I went back to the Thunkable community and explained what was going on and was hoping that someone could help me.

Offered Help

Someone was willing to have a look at my project. And maybe he had a different way of doing things.

The next day I got a private message. He already had spent more than 10 hours trying to fix the issue. At first, he thought he found the problem but later saw that things were still going wrong. He is still working on it, but I think it is not that easy.

I saw several other tutorials from Thunkable and at some, I have placed a comment, with the request that they also could make a tutorial on how to make a filtered view. Because I don’t think that I am the only one that wants to be able to do this.

I will just wait and see what they will do. Maybe I also need to place a topic on the Thunkable community.

Closing

At some point, I got very frustrated that things were not working. But as I already mentioned, I think that Thunkable has potential for me. I think that this is the platform for me that can do the things I want to do. In Glide Apps I created a small medical app that helps me with my health condition. My thought is to create this app also in Thunkable. The main advantage I see in Thunkable over Glide Apps is that Thunkable is able to send notifications and set system alarms.

I think that my main problem will be, is to get the hang of using the blocks. I think I need more practice in how to use them correctly. Of course, there is some documentation, but this raises more questions than answers. It would be helpful if there were more tutorials.

I will push on and make small steps and hopefully learn more about how to do things.