Hi, a completely non-technical person how much time it needs to learn how to make an app with bubble? i mean, is not so user friendly for a non technical like me. Thanks for your opinions
Dude , it is by far THE MOST user friendly web-development service out there . Maybe you can hack around with WordPress to create what you want but it will never be as flexible as BUBBLE is .
Donāt be lazy like me . Go through all those interactive tutorials and video lessons twice . Then play with it for a week or two and enroll to any bubble course . And if you keep on using it for a few hours every week , youāll be faster than a web-developer with 20 years of experience in around 3 months .
BTW to answer your question , it depends on how complex your app is . If itās a really simple app , you can make it in 1 day if you have all the content and design figured out beforehand .
Hey @DaleCooper Iām from a non-tech background too and have been learning Bubble since May, so I hope this helps to get you started. I practice Bubble everyday, and there are definitely still things that I need to learn and become more familiar with over time, but with that said, Bubble has absolutely unbelievable value for me and I canāt recommend learning it enough. I would never have been able to build absolutely anything close to what I can now, if not for Bubble, without years of learning how to code and program. From my perspective, to answer your question about how long it takes, it depends on how complex of an app you are hoping to build. To begin, Iād recommend watching the Bubble video tutorials (https://vimeo.com/bubblegroup) and taking an online course to get started and familiar the interface and how the data structuring part works. @iamsalar has a course on Udemy which teaches you how to build 7 different apps (https://www.udemy.com/buildastartup/), and @brentsum offers courses on his website The Codefree Startup (https://go.codefree.co/courses) as well. Perhaps one of the courses offered is similar to the app idea that you have.
Aside from taking a course like that to get you comfortable with the Bubble Interface and the different major concepts of Bubble (database structure, querying data, responsiveness), the forum is a really amazing place to come when youāre really stuck. For the trickiest concepts, Iāve learned the most from people in the forum. One other thing I find thatās helped me learn is to create a practice app on your account, and then treat it like a āwhiteboardā almost. So, when I donāt understand how to do something someone else is asking about in the forum, I open that app, create a blank page and just try things. That way youāre not worried about things look pretty, or formatting, or messing up an app you already have-- you just get good practice on building correctly.
If youād be interested in not starting from scratch, you can purchase a pre-built Bubble template, @levon of Bubblewits and Bubblestore sells them here: (https://bubblestore.io/). If you purchase a template, the app is already built and you can edit it however youād like. You can purchase apps similar to Trello, Yelp, AirBnb, and more there. Another good resource to know is if you are hoping to build mobile apps at some point is to check out @natedoggās http://codelessacademy.com/ course which teaches you how to turn your web application into an iphone application or an android application. Right now, when you build an application in Bubble it is a web application. Building mobile applications is in beta currently, and that involves building your app on one page within the Bubble editor, and then using hidden/visible groups to display all of your appās content depending upon what is clicked. Nate recently launched an app called Qoins (https://qoins.io/) which is definitely worth checking out since it was entirely built on Bubble. @vlad has a widgets website which is also helpful to learn from: https://widgets.airdev.co/.
Aside from all of that, the best way is to just read a lot of posts and practice a lot of examples. The more you do that, the more comfortable things will become. Bubble seems too good to be true at first glance, but it is not too good to be true! Itās amazing (understatement)! It continuously surprises me every day how this technology even exists and how I am so glad that I randomly stumbled upon it one day. You wonāt find a more helpful community, or a more responsive team so in my opinion, if you have any amount of free time you canāt go wrong with spending it learning Bubble.
I have been playing with Bubble for almost 2 weeks now, and you soon get into the swing of things.
Watch the videos to get a good feel for it. You get used to arguing with the responsive views, but will soon know how to deal with the common issues. Just treat everything you are trying to do as small distinct little blocks of functionality and not think of it as the overall aim/solution.
And of course, watch the intro videos, and read the forums!
Since I started, I managed to build website app that allows user login/profiles/frontpage/user dashboard/creating core thing, multiple image upload for thing/edit thing/following/searchā¦and continue to add more functionality as I try to build up towards release 1. (If I follow through with the idea!)
Get stuck in, nothing wrong with trial and error!
It really depends on you and your idea. To answer this question for my own application, I asked myself these questions.
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After completing the Bubble tutorial, am I able to build something? Even if itās just a website with some images and text?
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What do I want to achieve with Bubble and is that possible?
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How dedicated am I to building my idea/project/goal?
For myself, the answers were easy: Yes, yes, and beyond all reason.
After nearly one month of Bubbling, I can tell you I am comfortable at building front-end bubble sites. Elements and styling, images and responsiveness donāt trouble me much anymore.
To give you an idea on what that means to meā¦I have been learning and writing CSS, HTML and JavaScript to design websites for almost a year now. I struggle for hours to do traditionally with code what takes me minutes to achieve with Bubble.
That being said, there are plenty of ādrag and dropā website builders out there. Bubble gives me more freedom with my design than any others Iāve found, but itās not the only no-code option for website design.
Check out this curated list from our friends at product hunt to see what I mean: https://www.producthunt.com/@jurica87/collections/without-coding
While the visual design tools of Bubble are empowering and exciting in their own right, I believe itās the workflows, ability to connect with APIs and monetize it all while bringing it together in one whole solution that makes Bubble such an extraordinary tool.
Another personal example: I can spin up about 10 different application building frameworks and even get them live on the internet. What I canāt do is make them do anything. Iām really good at making checklists, but much more than that, Iām at a complete loss. Thereās just too many moving parts and too much abstraction in code for me to keep it all in my head.
To be fair, these frameworks require teams of developers to build out applications, version control that takes meticulous documentation and the technical knowledge of bringing this all together. It typically takes an aspiring developer years of full time practice to achieve this kind of mastery.
Itās all doable with Bubble ā at least I havenāt seen or heard of anything it canāt do that Iād want it to.
When I discovered Bubble a month ago, I was beat up with anxiety, stress and a sense of hopelessness. I have a true need to ship the application I am building. The technologies I was building on before I started bubbling were incredibly complicated. I recognized this after a few months of intensive study, and was resigned to yet another year of āstartup hardshipāā¦my savings nearly gone and, even worse, hardly any product to show for it.
My professional background is in education. Iām good at it. I was going to do it forever. Up until 2 years ago. This and that happened and I found myself needing something else. Not grasping the depth and complexity of what I was getting myself into, I decided this web application was going to be my best bet at returning to financial stability. Fast forward a crazy ass roller coaster of a year, and I was looking at the hard truths of a failed entrepreneurship endeavor. Today, however, I can say with total confidence that Bubble has empowered me to finalize my project in time frames that are incredibly rapid - something I didnāt believe was possible.
Bubble has restored my faith in my product, myself and my timeline to shipment. Stick around and youāll get some of that bubble magic too!
Hey Dale,
I am in the same boat as you. I found Bubble a couple of weeks ago and I am trying to find my way. I have watched most of the videos and still face palm a lot. I have yet grasp a lot (i.e. conditionals) and just read a lot in the forums, that is the gold mine of info. I have to learn this to achieve my goal so I am going to have to buck up and start asking the dumb noob questions (be prepared folks, you have been warned ).
So best of luck, hang out and soak it up. It may not have been mentioned before but andrew vega has a free course on udemy.com, so watch that one too. Please donāt let my learning deficiencies reflect on the instructors, itās not their fault I like to over think things.
Maybe someone will make a workflow explaining the basic blocks and interactions of conditionals in coloring book form, until then I just keep watching videos and hope something sinks in.
Canāt wait to see what you do with it Dale !
Thanks for the shoutout, @fayewatson. Great points. The Udemy course has helped over 200 Bubblers get acquainted with Bubble in a manner thatās realistic and usable. Though thatās fantastic, Iām still a believer in reaching out for help. Not everything is figured out yet which is why I push every Bubbler to share and engage with the community. Services like CoBubble are great for when you need help with scoping out a project before you start (or even when youāre stuck with an existing one) but itās most definitely worth the investment to learn Bubble on your own. Keep failing, keep improving.
Thank you for the support. I have many things to learn
@fayewatson From a complete newbie, itās amazing what you have been able to accomplish from a non-tech background. I have a number of apps I would like to make and the learning has been amazing. I actually have learned from observation and reverse engineering but am still stuck at making single page apps. Do you know of a resource that would show me how to make an app such as this on your page: https://louisforum.bubbleapps.io/version-test/company?debug_mode=true. I would really appreciate it. Thanks
Thank you so much for the kind words, @moth!! Wow! Itās hard to believe itās already been 5 years since I wrote my reply in this thread, but I still feel so grateful every day to have found Bubble, and to able to create apps that I could never create otherwise!
And that is so awesome that you are learning from observation and by reverse engineering different examples! Are you looking to build a single page web app with different āgroupsā for each page? I donāt think I have access to the link in your post; is a login required to view the example, or perhaps itās under a different link?