"Bring Application Power to the People" - New reso...

eddie1 · 12-09-2019 03:37 PM

Hello App Creators!

I’m excited to share a new resource I’ve created to help you promote app usage and creation within your organization or industry.

You’ll find a few familiar items such as customer stories and user reviews as well as some new resources including:
1. Presentation Template - A pre-made, customizable AppSheet Powerpoint template to help explain AppSheet to your colleagues
2. How to learn AppSheet - A 2-page cheatsheet you can share with new app creators to help them get going.
3. ROI (return-on-investment) Calculator - A DIY tool that helps you estimate and present cost/time savings of AppSheet vs. traditional development cycles as well as cost/time savings for AppSheet vs. status quo businesses processes.

Check it out: https://solutions.appsheet.com/resources

I’d love to hear any feedback on these existing resources as well as what resources might be helpful for you going forward. Thanks!

Koichi_Tsuji

Hi Eddie,
thank you for preparing and releasing new site , which is super awesome.

One suggestion.

I dont think we need to localise all the doc and reading here on that site, but version in other language version for presentation template might be found helpful by the community member who try to push appsheet to be taken by their organisation and clients. In the past, I made such translation quite few time and was not a job of fun actually.
The works done by other community member and place in a place publicly available might be found useful by the community member.
There should be legal implication to place such version officially from your prospective, but remind the usage of other version in other language to be at your OWN risk and disposal etc.

I off course volunteer for Japanese version, and hopefully Kirk will assist me!

Spanish, French, German, actually we have any other language here in Appsheet community. I m sure they will surely support this.

@Kirk_Masden

Kirk_Masden

Hi! As I think @tsuji_koichi knows, I’m interested in introducing a prototype AppSheet app I’ve made via videos with English narration and Japanese and English subtitles. Here’s the URL of one such video that briefly explains the idea behind my app but does not begin to introduce the AppSheet platform:

I make the videos bilingual in the hope that some Japanese students will use them to study English.

In the future, I’d like make at least one video like this one to explain how the AppSheet platform works and how the combination of AppSheet and Google sheets makes my app uniquely useful in educational settings. In doing so, I assume that there will not be any copyright issues if I use images from the AppSheet website or from the PowerPoint slides that you introduced to us today, @eddie. Please let us know if we need to be careful about using AppSheet images in videos about AppSheet that we make public.

Also, I noticed that we need approval to access “How to Use AppSheet”. Is that what you intended?

eddie1

Great feedback @tsuji_koichi and @Kirk_Masde! I’ve fixed the link. Good catch on that

I just talked with Santiago, and we definitely want to do more to localize resources that would be helpful for everyone! A couple questions for you two:

Would you mind compiling a list of all Japanese links related to AppSheet that would be helpful for users?
Which AppSheet resources do you think should be highest priority for us to localize into other languages?

Koichi_Tsuji

Hi @eddie

In terms of your 1st question, you mean you need a link to a web site where the Appsheet is quoted and talked about and their base language is in Japanese? Do you need a list of such sites? Sorry, I just want to make sure what you need.

For 2nd question, ideally, all the sites, in short answer, but I know it is going to be difficult. If Appsheet made the knowledge base, and support documents converted to a local language, it would find useful, but it is also hard to maintain and manage, as your team needs to deploy human power and resources. But if knowledge base and Appsheet app-editors are both localized, I believe it would be found useful and helpful by some users.

In the meantime, this was a presentation I made before, to push Appsheet as a development tool to my client. The original presentation was prepared by Appsheet, but I localized it to Japanese with some additional contents. Whenever my new potential clients come up, then I do presentation using this sheet to introduce Appsheet.

Link to Presentation

@Kirk_Masden

Kirk_Masden

Hi @eddie! My own impression is that AppSheet works very well with the Japanese language (unlike Arabic, which seems not to work very well because of the right to left orientation of the text:

)

I think that one obstacle for AppSheet in Japan is the difficulty that many Japanese people (including IT people) have with English. Another problem is that, so far at least, there isn’t much “buzz” about AppSheet in Japan. Your question got me interested so I did a little search with “AppSheet” and “の” (an extremely common “letter” in Japanese) on Google. That led me to a few web pages:

http://tanaka0.hatenablog.com/entry/2019/04/12/182126

https://www.atmarkit.co.jp/ait/articles/1904/25/news013.html

And, of course, this little list in not at all inclusive. Still, the last link I shared above is only one of two article in the Googles “News” category that even mentions “AppSheet” – I couldn’t find any articles in that category that focused on AppSheet. So, I think AppSheet has a ways to go in developing brand recognition in Japan.

I’m not quite ready to “go public” with my AppSheet education project in Japan but, if I can eventually make it a success, I hope to play at least a small part in building interest in the platform in this part of the world. When I do begin to try to publicize my education project, I’ll be sharing a prototype AppSheet app that students can copy and use on their own for free. I hope that my little app helps more Japanese become aware of what AppSheet can do. Here’s the current version of the app:

https://www.appsheet.com/portfolio/230844

In this regard, I’d like to make a request. Could AppSheet make it possible for prototype app logo’s and launch images to remain constant when copied? As far as I know, the logo and launch image settings are the only parts of a prototype app that are automatically changed. I don’t see that that is to AppSheet’s advantage and it seems to me to discourage people from making prototype app’s widely available.

Thanks in advance for your consideration.

Kirk_Masden

Hello again, @eddie! This comment is not specific to Japan.

I see that the link is fixed. Looks good.

I haven’t finished it yet but I’ve been working through the AppSheet Academy. I think it’s a good introduction but I wish it were a bit more hands on. I teach at a university and, as a university course it’s a “lecture” (where students are mostly listening) and not a “lab” or “seminar” where students actively involved and learning while doing.

Lectures have their place but I think AppSheet needs more “hands on” learning materials. I would suggest little lessons where learners start with a Google sheet that AppSheet has shared on the web and then follow a number of steps to make a simple app. For example, a learner might start with a simple “inventory” app that allows someone to take a picture of something and fill out some data about it. That kind of app could probably be completed in less than 20 minutes or so. That might be “Lesson 1”. “Lesson 2” might be, “now that you’ve made the app on your computer, try it out on your mobile device.” And so on and so forth. This approach would be less passive and also demonstrate that simple apps can be made quite quickly on AppSheet. I think the key to such an approach would be to make each lesson fairly short – perhaps 10 to 20 minutes or so if one follows the directions correctly. Add, at the end of each lesson, one would have the satisfaction of actually having made something or added a function to something.

This kind of approach would not be a substitute for the “lecture” style materials you have now. Rather, it would augment them. It would be even better if the two could be integrated in such a way that the student would alternate between listening to “lectures” and trying things out in the “lab.”

eddie1

@tsuji_koichi

I was just referencing any non-English pages that might be helpful for new international creators. No specific asks.
Yes, the entire knowledge base would definitely be prohibitive at this point haha. I’ll work on compiling the community resources as a first step.
Thank you for the Japanese version of the presentation! Looks great

@Kirk_Masden
Great feedback on Arabic and the prototype issue. If you haven’t already, feel free to circulate the prototype idea in feature requests. The higher the community demand, the more our dev team will be able to prioritize the request

Great feedback on AppSheet Academy! I’ve shared your feedback with Peter and the product team. We’re working on an internal training resource that has many of the features you mentioned that will hopefully be able to augment the existing resources. The product team will be working on improving the user training experience in the coming months.

Kirk_Masden

I have posted about this in the past but, unfortunately, the demand doesn’t seem to be high:

Still, even if people like me (that is, people who are primarily interested in publishing apps as free prototypes) are in the minority, I hope that AppSheet will eventually decide to allow prototype app logos to remain unchanged when the prototypes are copied. I think it should be a pretty easy modification to make and as I wrote above, I have a hard time understanding how randomizing app logos when they are copied is in AppSheet’s interest.

Fabian_Weller

@eddie the future goal should definitely be to translate the whole AppSheet platform to many languages. Appian for example is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

eddie1

@Fabian - We hope to get there someday (sooner rather than later)! I will point out that Appian’s a publicly-traded company with a little more resources than us at this point

Fabian_Weller

Jehovah’s Witnesses are non commercial, but they where able to translate their website jw.org in more than 1.000 languages
Sorry just joking. I can imagine how much work it is to translate the whole platform.

Kirk_Masden

The only language I’m really familiar with besides English is Japanese. In regard to Japanese, I’m hoping that AppSheet will eventually grow to the point that it can establish an office in Japan and that Japanese employees can help lead a user forum like this one. Without such a forum, I think learning AppSheet via translated materials will be difficult.

In the meantime, I hope that more Japanese people with good English skills can join this forum, learn the platform, and then help get the word out in Japan. At the moment, @tsuji_koichi is the only Japanese person I know who is involved here but, thankfully, he’s active enough to constitute a one-man movement. I hope he can bring others along and, of course, I’ll try to do what I can.

eddie1

I shared this internally to see if it picks up any traction. Agreed that this would be a great fix. Thanks for bringing it to the forefront!

Izzat_Safrah

It will help us If there option ( Horizontal Align ).

eddie1

@UNITED_SKATEBOARDS I made sure our two designers are at least aware of this, so they can log it in their mental backlog. Thank you for your feedback!

Kirk_Masden

This may be relevant to the subject of how to support AppSheet in different linguistic environments:

@praveen, I wonder if you think this might be important for the Indian market.

"Bring Application Power to the People" - New resource for app creators seeking to inspire others (including management and IT) to use and build apps