Feeling exhausted and it has nothing to do with buzztouch. I joined at some point in the late spring to buzztouch and now it has been few months from my last visit. It's been lately so, that my work takes so much time that if I am not at work, I am sleeping. So what does this have to do with buzztouch? I had sometime at work today so I stumbled on a "easy app making service" and decided to try it. Mainly because it's still in beta, hence free. Their solution was a visual designer, where you laid ready made buttons and boxes, but still you had quite many choices even in beta stage. In half hour I had made an decent looking app, which I actually submitted to App Store just for the fun of it. After submitting it, I just decided to jump to buzztouch, having paid from it and all. I must admit that I find buzztouch discouraging. It is everything but easy to start to use. Options and menus in app building seem somewhat hard to understand. There is no easy way to preview your app. There seem to be no visual editor. Everything happens in a way, which makes app building guide hard. For me at least. I do like design everything from the visual side of things. Make something look nice and then figure out how to do it. Buzztouch seems to do it the other way around. You have take huge effort to make apps look nice. For a "easy" app building solution, it's really not that easy. I do not know if these are my problems or is this just the way buzztouch is designed. I am struggling to take the plunge and read enough. I like to figure out things by trial and error. It makes it very rewarding. Buzztouch seems to be solution which is made extremely hard to learn. Huge amount of reading or tweaking just for the simplest of tasks. Maybe I am wrong, maybe I have missed something crusial. I do like buzztouch as a community. I like the fact that people are willing to help you, if you need it. I like the fact that the pricing is not ripping you off. I just wish that I had time to learn it the way it's intended. Hope everyone has a great rest of the year. I'll keep fighting the windmills. -Mikko (Like you see, English is not my first language. So please forgive me.)

Hi Mikko, Sometimes a person can get frustrated but once that light bulb clicks, it's really easy here @buzztouch. Hang in there and you have a community waiting to help you. LA

I have to agree with LA, once you do one app go through the process it's really easy after that and even easier with the community. I've tried many app building platforms and I found all to be very limited or pricey and most often you didn't actually own the app. And many are not fully native, which I think is really important to know as it effects user experience. I hate coding but I'm glad I know the basics enough to build a decent app and I'm glad I understand and know the process. If you can, hang in there, I think what you will learn and pick up a long the way will be worth it.

Mikko - I hear your frustration. Know that you are not alone and we at Buzztouch have already been talking about how we might incorporate some of the ideas you lifted up. The beauty of a place like Buzztouch is it keeps getting better. That's in part to people like you who point out what's obvious to someone new to the site that sometimes skips over the veterans that have gotten used to "the way things are". Keep up the great observations!

@TheMikaelT: Makes perfect sense. Perfect sense. And, just to be sure we're all on the same page, like @chris1 mentions, making observations like this and adding to the conversation is important. It's hard to hear criticism sometimes but we've come to rely on it as we do the best we can to move forward. My take: Today, there are LOTS of different solutions online designed to help make the app making process easier, more productive, more profitable, etc, etc. This was not the case a few years ago when Buzztouch was conceptualized. We pioneered lots of the concepts you see online and as such it makes pefect sense that some of the more recent offerings have improved many parts of the process. We've made lots of improvements too, and, we have lots more to introduce. Like you mentioned, design and UX experience is not one of our strongpoints. We think each offer has strenghts and weaknesses and surely design is one of our weaknesses. However, just like anything, it's a matter of opinion and weighing the pros and cons of each solution yields different results for each of us. Our approach hinges around flexibility, community, open and transparent. The end result, a balance between "easy" and "flexible." We are absolutely aware of the difference between "understanding nothing" software and "understanding something" software. In order to get the most out of Buzztouch it's necessary for users to understand something. In fact, this is the audience we've focussed on helping. People intersted in understanding some core concepts about how apps work - including some code. Includeing some technical things. Including some tools (think compiler). We think this is the best approach moving forward - making software that helps people that are genuinely intersted in understanding "something" about how their app works. We cant' do this by hiding everything behind a slick UI. Getting your hands dirty and tinkering a bit is for sure 100% part of maximizing what Buzztouch offers. We're committed to our mission and to moving this forward. Making it easier, more efficient, and ultimately better for newcomers and veterans is what we do. Your post is helping us do this better and we thank you for taking the time to comment. D.

Mikko, Thank you so much for taking the time to write your post and bring some of these things to our attention. Its important for us to hear about your experiences, both positive and negative. We completely understand all the ways that we excel and succeed at helping people make apps, but sometimes its hard for us to see the ways that we could improve our offerings. Like many of our members have said above, I am confident you can figure out how Buzztouch "works", and ultimately it will be up to you to decide if the time investment will be worth it to you. I certainly hope you come to the conclusion that it is. We are working on ways to make the learning curve less steep. But in the meantime, if you find something a little confusing, feel free to ask for help, and we will be happy to show you the way. Good luck, and I hope your workload allows you more time to create apps, regardless of the methods you use. -Chris

Moro Mikko - you are not alone. I recently joined and am determined to make BT the app platform for my needs. I am an old school programmer and internet marketer, with some ideas for apps that will help people and make money at the same time. I went through the 2 learning paths (Control Panel + Android) and passed with almost perfect scores. I used the app builder to make a simple app with just 1 text screen. My challenge has been to find an updated step-by-step process for getting eclipse installed + the SDK etc. I went to the Android developer site and downloaded the integrated IDE (has SDK already built in) and it is now installed, but I now struggling to figure out what else to do, to make this all work, as the pdf's and videos don't reference this up to date IDE. I think the issue is that all the experienced members have figured it out themselves over time, and it must be very hard for them to go back to the "Start" and see it from the eyes of a newbie, and make the necessary step by step instructions that reference the new versions etc. I'll take another run at it tomorrow and will try document the process for the next newbies, once I get it to work. Btw I have been to aanekoski so it's truly a small world :) Cheers, Peter

Not much to say other than what's already been said! Once you get the hang of it, you'll be amazed at the simplicity of Buzztouch. But it for sure has a learning curve, and it's one that can prevent a good number of people from getting involved. But, in the end, what you get with Buzztouch that you don't get from others - including this amazing community - seems to make it all worth the effort, in my opinion. Please hang in there, and keep providing this valuable feedback. I assure you the Buzztouch leadership team is listening! @Peter - check out this video...it shows how to deal with the new Android code, step-by-step: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgurXKgP2AE Got a suggestion for a video? Let me know! Mark

It is now exactly two years since I first got introduced to the app world via a course by Amish Shah. Then AppMakr was all the rage, it was free and you could have an app real fast, just by tinkering on their site. In the middle of the course, however, they started charging for apps creation & hosting. From free the price went in one day to unbelievable $79 PER MONTH AND PER APP. Then I went to iBuildApp and built six apps, by a very manual procedure. My first app, which showed some 26 videos from YouTube, took a complete week to create. Others were similar in length. Half a year has passed and in the middle of 2012, iBuildApp also started charging, this time, not for apps creation but only for hosting. The price I believe was 7 or 9 dollars per month, per app. I did not want to pay, so first they put their own ads into the apps, and then, in October 2012, they COMPLETELY obfuscated my apps and none of them was even able to be downloaded from Google Play. Does that sound just a bit unfair? High-handed? Greedy? Free actually has a price, as we can see. I have asked them to give me the keystore files without which it would not possible to create a new version of my apps. They refused to yield them to me. I found the hardest possible way that my apps were not really my apps but theirs. So, where was I at that moment? I was already at Buzztouch, as Amish Shah recommended it wholeharteadly in the end of 2011. Why wasn't I with Buzztouch in the first part of 2012 -- because it was stuck still at 1.5 for Android... which I did not particularly like. When I was back, Buzztouch progressed and the lowest version for Android was 2.2, which was acceptable (and still is). Why did I settle down with Buzztouch? 1) I get the source code and I sign my apps on my own (at least for Android). This means that my apps are really mine. They can exist even if I stop all the ties that lead from apps to the Buzztouch core site. Mine is mine is mine. 2) It is open sourced. Should you want to do something with it, you could if you tried. I tried and developed a system for publishing Android apps really fast, say, one app per hour, including creating the icons and publishing it on the Google Play. Try to do that with other shiny objects floating in the apps builder's sites space. 3) You can have your own version of Buzztouch, on your own server and you can create your own white label bussines of selling creation and hosting of apps to other people. (See what Ed Reyes posts in the forum to see how he is generating thousands of dollars just by hosting the apps.) 4) Buzztouch is improving and getting along with the change of times. This is perhaps the worst aspect of Buzztouch, it sometimes takes very long time to become compatible with the latest versions of Android and iOS. But, eventually, it does happen and then we can work with the best tools of the trade (at least until Google and Apple stir the waters again). 5) The community here is very friendly. 6) There is a steep learning curve but what can you expect when you want to develop apps? Three operating systems to cover, Windows, Mac and Linux, two competing mobile operating systems to cover, Android and iOS, then there are so many plugins to choose from within Buzztouch itself... I do not develop for iOS because I do not have the hardware, but Android has long stopped being an obstacle. For me, Eclipse is almost non-existant, as once I customize an app within it, it never makes trouble. It is very predictable, although in the first period of learning it does not seem so. 7) It is true that Buzztouch does not have a way of showing the app online, in control panel. That is not a problem because you can watch the changes in the app on the device itself, once you set everything within Eclipse. 8) You can change the app right from the control panel, without recompiling and resubmitting and waiting for the app to be approved. That may be the very best aspect of Buzztouch! Buzztouch is not for everyone, but it is for me!

The fact that you like to " figure out things by trial and error" is awesome..Buzztouch is an ideal place to put that to action. Even after two years of using this site, with every new app I make I will inevitably get stuck on some problem that I just can't seem to solve, but as long as I stick to it I eventually find the solution That's the thing that I think is so cool about code and building apps...if you have an idea, it can be done. It's just a matter of digging for the answers and putting in the time Also, I see that this is only your second post in 5 months - the best advice I can give you is to take advantage of the helpful community here and post a thread whenever you get stuck. it might get you a lot farther a lot faster hopefully you stick around :)

I am speechless how many of you have answered to my little text. Thank you for giving advice and doing some cheering up. I bow to you all. I think that this is an strong statement on behalf of how generous and nice people on Buzztouch are. Reading all of your replies and thoughts gives a lot of to think about. I do completely agree with so much what you guys are saying. Many other easy app making solutions are extremely pricey and their end user agreements are little dodgy at times. Flashy design with messing inside. My text was not meant as a critique. It was more of an observation and ramblings of a frustrated individual with lots of plans and no time. I thing Buzztouch is an extremely successful way of doing something creative. And like I said, and these messages show, I don't not know another place with so dedicated users and people behind the platform. Everywhere you look, there is someone willing to help. More I think of this, I think many of my problems are in fact MY problems. Or my approach to those challenges is somewhat wrong. Like the fact that I would like see some quick way to preview my app. Well, opening the files in xcode and previewing through simulator, is actually mind numbingly easy. I have never been coder, programmer or developer in any stage. I am more designer minded human. I might draw app UI to my napkin and then try to figure out how to do it. That's the way my mind seems to work. I think that I find myself lost because I find it hard to try to solve things by code and so on. My projects evolve hugely through out production, which I think is more of an rule than exception. So making changes without fast preview is hard for me. But that's something that is not Buzztouch's fault. I know I will struggle with this also in the future. I know my shortages, or at least some of them, and I try to play by them. There are guides and tutorials on using Buzztouch and Xcode, so maybe I just have go through them so many times that I understand even 10% of it all. Then I can start trying different things. I would once again thank everyone for taking their time and answering. My small brain is overwhelmed by all this cheering and back slapping. (- Peter, that is one of the absurd things of the internet. What is the change to run into someone who has visited Äänekoski? Tiny place in the middle of nowhere.) I shall once again ride against the windmills and see what comes out of it. (Why all the Don Quixote references? My mind sometimes baffles me.) Deeply grateful Mikko

I plan to become a paid member now, mainly because of this thread and all the positive support.

Buddy, I delayed to see your response before making mine. Alot has been said but I just wanted to make a few points: 1- I was like you in all ramification...not a coder 2- I found BT as the only platform that never let you all by yourself...huge community and the fact you own your code...you lay claim to your efforts. 3- My little priced discovery is this: other apps site are like microwave warmed food...you never know the food was prepared while BT makes you cook while being tutored before you beat your chest as a good cook. 4- The best part of BT for me is that...I now relate better with my clients as both a business person and a mid-techie. Executives want someone who can breakdown the whole techie thing to them like a 2 year old. BT helps you do that. 5- I am happy that your response has been very inspiring and many will find it useful. 6- Like you may have found out, BT allows you to do the real thing. You get a system, get SDKs, Devices and tinker with the source even with superb help. You spot the issues before your users do...aint that cool? 7- Anything worth doing is worth doing well has been my motto.