Glide
You can make apps extremely fast with Glide. You can make a high-quality looking app extremely fast because of their prebuilt components. The components have basic styling which looks appropriate on all device sizes. The downside of these blocks that come with styling is that you are very limited in customising the design. You can change the layout and text sizes to a certain extent, but it's limited.
Their online builder works well. It's fast, it looks good and the layout is well-designed. You can change your app's primary color, theme and typography under the settings tab. These 3 options have the biggest effect on the app's layout.
In the builder itself it is quite simple. You can drag any component you need and then simply change the data you need inside it.
I used the built-in tables in Glides. You can also sync it with Airtable or Spreadsheet but I was interested in what the built-in tables could offer.
Glide is excellent for people that want to create an app but have little to no experience with programming and designing. It makes sure that the app looks nice and that everything works like forms and buttons. You can use it to create inventory tracking apps or budget tracking apps. You can basically build everything as long as your database doesn't get too complex. Here are some things that amazed me how easy it was:
Making a form in Glide and adding data to the database was a piece of cake. You add a button that opens the form, you link the form to the correct table, and you mark which fields are mandatory. Your form can now be used and the data that gets submitted is saved in the table.
To show data like upcoming events, you create a table with the necessary columns like time, location and title. You add an inline list, link it to the events table and you're done. The only thing left to do is change the style of how you want the component to look like. In addition, you can change the data that you want to show in your table.
As someone who has been designing and programming for the last couple of years, the limited amount of options quickly becomes inconvenient. You easily run into features that aren't possible.
I only want to show the post that the user is part of. To do this, I need to take the posts table and apply a filter to only show the post where a user is part of. In the table, I added myself to Post 3. But when I try to add a filter that allows users to only see the post they are a part of, I am left with only the option of filtering on whether a post is empty or not.
I want to make a tab where users can submit a sick note. It's not possible to make a tab without linking it to a table. So I create a table called sick notes and link it to that tab. What happens is that the data written in the sick notes table gets shown on that tab for everybody. You can filter that data but this is a serious security issue. Luckily, Glide warns its users that this isn't a great way for protecting private information.
Currently, to combine static and dynamic text, I have to create a new column in my table. Then write the template text, replace a word with another column and then I can add it to the app. This seems like a complicated way to complete an easy task. It isn't efficient for performance because it adds an unnecessary column to the table. And it's also not easy to find as a user.
It's not really relevant for this assignment but I would assume that lots of people would love to publish their app to the App Store. Most no-code tools have that option. Glide doesn't support it nor does it have any documentation about it
To add external data like tides and weather information, you have to import the data into a spreadsheet. Then, you have to link the spreadsheet to your project and then pull the data into your project. This isn't how you want to add external data to an app. It would be helpful to pull data from any API into Glide and use it when building the app.
The builder's overall experience is positive, but there are a few small remarks that could be made to make it even better.
- When I click outside an opened dropdown menu, the menu often doesn't close.
- When writing a date in the table, there isn't any date picker or a tool that helps me write the date.
Glide is a very powerful tool but it doesn't meet the requirements I have for my application. It's easy for non-professionals to make good looking apps but making a sophisticated app with different kinds of roles and users is not yet possible with Glide.