Adalo
Adalo lets you build no-code web & mobile applications with its easy-to-use drag and drop platform. It offers a 14 day free trial to experiment with all the features they have to offer.
I didn't expect a lot from Adalo after using it for the first couple of minutes. The design of their website looked a bit outdated and when you are making the app, the design is pixelated. For example, my design uses shadows. The shadows look terrible when you build the app. But when you preview it, the shadows actually are quite decent.
Adalo comes with a prebuilt login system. You can still change the design of the login pages which is great. This saves users a lot of time.
You can basically design everything how you want. There are only a couple of design options that aren't built-in. I missed the ability to set the border radius of corners individually. There is an option to set the border radius only for all corners. Besides this option missing, I was able to tweak everything to my liking.
To add a new component, click on the large plus button on the top left and search for the required component. All the necessary components to build an application are available. Simply drag and drop the component to the screen you want to add it to and tweet it to your liking.
A cool feature of Adalo is their magic text. It allows you to add variable text to a text component. It's super simple and works really well. It allows you to combine static and variable text. This way, I was able to welcome the user by their name which makes the app more personal. You can also show the current date or time to the user. Really cool and simple feature.
By clicking on the database tab at the left of the screen. You can view all your database collections. You can add as many as you like in the free trial. They have built-in database collections and external collections. I tried them both to see which I liked best. I would use the internal database collection more if the screen to edit records wasn't so claustrophobic. To try out external collections, I tried Xano. It's easy to setup. You can even test an API call and see which data you receive.
Next up I wanted to show the event data on the home page. The first step is to group an event component. Next create a list and drop the event inside that list. Finally, link the correct data with magic text and the job is done. Now there is one problem that I face when I attempt to complete the event. When I try to link the image to the database, the option doesn't show up. I decided not to waste too much time trying to fix this issue.
The last thing I want to mention is actions. Actions ensure that your app works properly. They can link to another page or create a new instance in your database, or both. You can add as many actions as you want. For example, when I submit a new lost child report, I create a new instance in the database with all the details. In addition, I also send out a notification to everyone and I send the user back to the previous screen.
You can even add actions based on location. This would mean I could only send a notification to neighbouring posts. We sometimes have lost children that walk really far but we have never seen someone walking from post 1A to post 11.
There are 2 ways to make forms. The first option is to drag in the form element and link it with a data collection. This is usually the easiest way but there are quite a phew problems. As an example, everything is viewed as text. You don't have the option to change the form type. This means you can't make forms this way that include images, date pickers, ...
The second option is to make your own form with all the forms & fields components. This way we can add a dropdown menu, image pickers, .... The downside of this is that form verification isn't really possible. The only feedback a user gets when he or she does something wrong is a grey 404 error saying that it failed. You have no option to make an input field required on Adalo itself.
I would love to be able to display a green success message when a form has been submitted successfully. The only way to show a success message right now is to send the user to a different success page. This isn't really what I'm looking for.
Adalo is yet another helpful tool for developing no-code apps. It has very few to no limitations to making whatever you want. It would be a near-perfect tool if they made some more options for their forms. It's really the only downside I see with Adalo.
