How we improved our internal tool builder in the last 6 months

Having originated in September 2019, the UI Bakery internal tools builder continues its development. While we’re making ambitious plans on our further low-code platform improvements, see how we have already enhanced UI Bakery over the last 6 months: 

Responsive design

With no manual efforts, we enabled you to visually create a business app or an internal tool with a responsive design 5 times faster than within custom app development. No more need to prepare several mockups for various screen sizes – UI Bakery automatically makes your web app fit different screens.  

The UI Bakery low-code platform adjusts your web app for 5 screen sizes:

• Full HD (1144 px).
• Desktop (1024 px).
• Tablet (768 px).
• Phone: landscape (480 px).
• Phone: portrait (320 px).

You can manage all the screen sizes at once, or some of them separately. You can also create different layouts for different screen sizes, customize their appearance, change paddings, margins, element sizes. Moreover, you can use a regular 12-column grid in the UI Bakery apps builder to set the size of the elements instead of using pixels and percentage for that.

Data connection & API integration

This feature has become one of the key milestones for UI Bakery. For now.

With the release of the Data connection feature, you now can visually build a web app UI, or an internal tool with the full-fledged functionality.

You’re able to:

• Call any HTTP API to connect to the backend.
• Build a dashboard from a REST API.
• Integrate your frontend with 3rd party APIs.
• Manage data collections.
• Connect your data to UI components like charts, maps, tables, images, dashboards, etc.
• Add workflows (the sets of steps created to react to user interactions). 
• Customize your workflows with JavaScript code if needed.
• Sort and filter data using custom code, and more.

Moving to Angular 9+

One of the largest Angular releases for the past 3 years had not passed by UI Bakery – our low-code development platform was updated to Angular 9+.

‍UPD: later in 2020, it was updated to Angular 10, and we continue to update our low-code platform.

This release covers the framework, Angular Material, and the CLI. More about the fixes and features included into this release you can read here. Together with the improvements this release brought, the UI Bakery low-code tool improved as well. 

New UI Bakery documentation

Besides enhancing the UI Bakery low-code internal tool builder, we improved our knowledge base to make your work in UI Bakery more seamless. 

Thorough how-to articles, comprehensive video tutorials and guides, 40-minute webinar recaps, detailed responses to the most popular questions, and many more.

Onboarding tutorial

To simplify your first interaction with the UI Bakery app builder, you can pass an onboarding tutorial we prepared. It’s tailored for 2 types of users – those with a development background, and the ones with no such background. You’ll learn how to work with the core UI Bakery elements – Builder, Painter, Data tool, Working area, Component picker, Configuration panel, Toolbar, Sidebar, Navigation bar.

The tutorial is based on a simple example showing how to build an article card, configure, and customize it.

How-to webinars

Looking for a low-code solution to build a web app? We launched a series of free webinars on how to build web apps with a responsive design for various industries and purposes using our low-code development tool.

The webinars will be useful for beginners and advanced UI Bakery users, and for those who are searching for an appropriate low-code platform. During the webinars, we'll show you how to build various types of dashboards and internal tools. No outstanding technical background is needed.

Customizable dashboard templates

To relieve you from the need to create a business app or an internal tool from scratch, we prepared a range of ready-made templates with a responsive design. All the templates are available for free in UI Bakery. You can customize them as needed using the predefined layouts, widgets, and other ready-made UI components. 

We’re constantly expanding the list of our free templates. The templates we have now relate to such areas as sales, education, customer success, inventory management, finances, healthcare, logistics, product management, and more. We’re preparing the templates with the implemented 3rd party integrations.

Have any template to suggest? Do not hesitate to post your idea in the UI Bakery community, or vote for the existing template requests.

New text settings and updated color palette

These updates are minor but still valuable. With the new text settings, you get more customization opportunities relating to styles, text types, etc. Thus, you can make the text elements in your internal tool or a business app more appealing.

With the enhanced color palette, you can get a much softer color stretching – from bright to dark shades. Customize each color separately with no oversaturation. Pop in the platform to see how it works.

So, what’s next?

We’ve come a long way but there’s still a lot to improve in UI Bakery. ‍

Stay tuned, stay with UI Bakery. And do not hesitate to contact our team to get a free demo and a free training session. We'll show you around and help you build the first version of your internal tool.