Airtable Adds an Interface Designer

In November of last year Airtable announced a major new feature, a visual interface designer. In the past, the methods for presenting an interface other than the spreadsheet view were pretty limited. Now you can use a simple drag-and-drop builder to create a user interface and connect it to your data, so any user action on the interface automatically updates the data in your base. You just choose a layout, import a table from your base and start adding design elements to the interface.

There are four layouts to choose from for your interface:

• Record Review - All the records in the base are shown in summary on the left side of the screen - clicking on any one of them displays the entire record so it can be edited. You can also filter the data sent to the interface so that only the records you want to show are actually displayed.
• Record Summary - If you want to work with one record at a time without rapidly moving back and forth between records, this layout allows you to use the entire screen to display all the detail for a given record.
• Dashboard - The Dashboard layout focuses on presenting key data visually primarily in the form of graphs and charts. 
• Blank - If you need an interface that doesn't fit into the other three categories, you can choose the blank layout and create a custom interface by adding whatever elements you want.

Elements that you can add to your interface include:

• Text boxes to hold text content
• Dividers to separate sections of the interface screen
• Charts
• Number boxes
• Grid elements to hold table data
• Timeline elements
• Comment boxes

You can find additional information at: 

  https://www.airtable.com/guides/collaborate/getting-started-with-interface-designer 

Another Bubble.io

 Anyone who has been exposed to world of no-code is probably familiar with bubble.io, one of the most popular no-code development platforms. Yesterday I ran across another Bubble.io though - an award-winning augmented reality app developed for the 2018 Seattle AR/VR Hackathon. The app isn't a "no-code" product but it caught my interest because of the name and because augmented reality is rapidly making its way into the world of no-code.

What exactly is "augmented reality"? It's loosely defined as digital information superimposed on real world objects. If you watch college or NFL football you're familiar with that yellow "first down" line that you see on your TV. Or maybe you've used an app that shows how different pairs of reading glasses would look on your face in real life. Those are both examples of augmented reality and there are more examples popping up every day. 

If you look at most lists of emerging trends in both the private and business sectors, you'll find augmented reality as one of the main areas to keep an eye on. No-code platforms are also adding AR features, one example being Appy Pie's built-in AR/VR App Builder. Other platforms may not have integrated AR into their system yet, but you're starting to see AR plugins and I expect that trend to grow significantly in 2022.

What can you create with augmented reality? The Bubble.io app is a great example of the possible uses for AR applications. People like myself who have suffered significant hearing loss can find it really difficult at times to understand what other people are saying. Bubble.io utilizes augmented reality to provide real time closed captioning for individuals who are hearing impaired. It differentiates between speakers and displays speech "bubbles" showing what each person is saying as they say it. 

You can see an example of the Bubble.io app at work at:   https://eskandari.me/bubble-io

New Series on No-Code Coming Soon on Webflow TV

Webflow TV is planning to launch a new series on the growth of no-code, beginning in early 2022. The announcement reads:

No-code web development is changing the game and helping people close the gap between idea and impact. Generation No-Code, goes behind the curtain to tell real stories of how agencies, entrepreneurs, and creatives are becoming more empowered on the web — and using no-code tools to pursue their dreams. See firsthand the impact no-code is having on today’s visionaries and get inspired by their passion and drive. Generation No-Code is directed by Matthew Encina and the first episode will premiere in early 2022 on Webflow TV. (https://webflow.com/tv)

Stay tuned for further information...

A Template for Designers, Writers and Developers

Zeroqode (www.zeroqode.com) has an interesting no-code template that could be useful for anyone who wants to build an app to display their projects, including things like other apps, books, artwork, etc. Here's the description for "Archimist":

Archimist no-code template is designed to help you build an app without code which allows you to showcase your works, add and delete projects, add team members, design articles and more. This fully functional and responsive template is suitable for architectural, interior design, construction practices etc. It will make your work look more impressive and attractive to viewers and potential customers.

Features:
- Filterable & Integrated projects/portfolio
- Newsletters subscription to mailchimp
- Micro Blog/News page
- Well designed dashboard
- Fully responsive pages
- Sharing buttons for blog
- Minimalist Design

GPT-3 Now Available to All Developers

OpenAI has just made GPT-3 generally available to all developers (in supported countries). What is GPT-3? Wikipedia defines Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 as an autoregressive language model that uses a deep learning neural network to produce human-like text. In other words, GPT-3 can automatically write news stories and articles, create blog posts, compose poetry, and more, in addition to generating working program code in more than a dozen programming languages. GPT-3 is also being used to develop conversational models which can respond to comments or questions with replies that fit the context of the conversation.

The potential for GPT-3 continues to grow with new applications showing up almost every day. For instance, one developer has combined Figma's user interface prototyping with GPT-3 to create websites just by describing the desired type of website in a couple of sentences. Another example of GPT-3's flexibility is its ability to convert program code from one language to another using CodeX, GPT-3's code generator. Mark Ryan has even been able to use CodeX to convert old COBOL legacy code into usable JavaScript routines (https://towardsdatascience.com/codex-translates-cobol-into-javascript-266205d606c0). You can find dozens of other examples of what's possible with GPT-3 by going to:https://gpt3demo.com/. 

There are a number of known weaknesses in GPT-3 though: 

• The model is pre-trained - it doesn't continue to learn from each interaction.
• If the Internet material that was used to train GPT-3 included biased content, GPT-3 will tend to exhibit those same biases.
• GPT-3 can only accept a limited amount of input for each interaction, so the input has to adequately describe the desired result.

Plus GPT-3 also has a dark side. According to an article on VentureBeat.com, "the Middlebury Institute of International Studies’ Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism found that GPT-3 can generate “influential” text that could radicalize people into far-right extremist ideologies. A group at Georgetown University has used GPT-3 to generate misinformation, including stories around a false narrative, articles altered to push a bogus perspective, and tweets riffing on particular points of disinformation."

OpenAI does have guidelines that specify what type of content GPT-3 can and can't be used to create and filters to try to detect models that violate those guidelines. However, like many other advances in technology, it's still an open question as to whether tools like GPT-3 can be supervised effectively and what their overall effect will be. 

So what's the future of GPT-3 and similar deep learning models? The best answer  is that OpenAI and other organizations specializing in neural network applications are already hard at work attempting to develop even more advanced deep learning models. There's no turning back at this point, so hopefully GPT-3 and its successors will avoid the "AI is going to take over" stigma and turn out to produce more benefits than problems.

Glide Pages

 Glide (www.glideapps.com) has been one of the top choices for anyone looking to create mobile apps without coding, but they have just added the "missing piece" to their platform. With the introduction of "Glide Pages", you now have the ability to create responsive web apps and websites in addition to native mobile applications. 

You build Glide "pages" by dragging and dropping "Collections" onto the design screen. There are different types of Collections for different types of data - "cards" for images and "grids", "table b" and "lists" for tabular data. You can also attach "actions" to collection objects, items within a collection and other design components. Actions include updating records, showing notifications and calling webhooks (webhooks are a mechanism for applications to communicate with each other). 

Since apps created with Glide Pages are actually web-based, it's easy to provide people with access to your application just by setting up a web "portal" and providing users with the URL for that web page. Setting up a portal also allows you to create a secure environment by requiring user logins, where each user only has access to the data specified for their particular group or role.

You can find more detailed information on Glide Pages at:

"https://docs.glideapps.com/all/courses/introduction-to-pages"  and 

"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhGbbUUFzVk"

Data Cleaning with No-Code

What is “data cleaning” and why do it?

Almost every organization has missing, incomplete, duplicated, inaccurate or otherwise unreliable records in their spreadsheets or database. In order to work with that data to produce meaningful information those records have to be repaired or deleted - “cleaned” in other words. Doing that by hand is time-consuming, error-prone and expensive and creating a program to do the work requires coding expertise.  Now however, there are no-code platforms that can help businesses repair their data automatically, without doing any program coding. 

What is “cleaned” data used for?

In recent years more and more organizations are using their accumulated historical data to create data visualizations and to train machine learning models. Errors in the input data due to missing, incomplete or invalid fields will lead to invalid or inaccurate results from machine learning models trained on that data.

How does a no-code data cleaning site work?

Generally you import your raw data, make sure all the columns are showing with the correct type of data in each column, and then you select to start cleaning. At that point you can normally set up cleaning rules or "transformations" for each particular column. A cleaning rule might be "Remove duplicate values" or "Replace any missing values with the word 'Unknown'" or "Remove any rows with a value over $999 in this column". Once the data has been cleaned you can visually spot check it to make corrections manually or to make sure that you didn't leave out any necessary transformations. Then you should be able to export the cleaned data as a CSV file that can be used as input for a "no-code" machine learning platform.

Where can I find a no-code data cleaning platform?

There are a number of platforms that allow you to clean raw data without needing to do any coding. Probably the most complete platform at the moment is Amazon Web Services' Glue DataBrew; you can find a detailed explanation of how it works and what options you have available with it at:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-aws-glue-databrew-a-visual-data-preparation-tool-that-helps-you-clean-and-normalize-data-faster/