Art Catalog App and Stat Dashboards
I have long enjoyed tinkering around the edges of the technology and software world. I haven’t shared much on this site lately other than paintings, but over the past year or so, I have been messing around with some of the “low code”/”no code” app development solutions that are available. I built an art catalog app and stat dashboards, which I wanted to share here and discuss a bit more.
My favorite tool so far has been Google AppSheet, which I used to design a smartphone app I could use to catalog and track my artwork. That has been incredibly useful, but I thought I’d pivot and try something else with it when I realized you could actually embed it on a website. I made a copy of the app and stripped out some of the functionality to build a public-facing version. If this worked right, a working app should be embedded on this page!
Even though the data is separate from my primary app, I think I can still copy over updates fairly easily. So I hope to keep this rolling if it works well.
Aside from building low-code apps, I am also a huge fan of dashboards. I have been a spreadsheet fanatic for decades, and have talked about that in older posts about Excel functions and pivot tables. But more recently, I’ve come to love building dashboards (mostly using PowerBI) – after all, a dashboard is basically just like a shareable pivot table. Which makes it a great thing in my book. Anyhow, I’ve been exploring some other solutions beyond PowerBI and came across Google Looker Studio which I’ve really enjoyed. Since Google is so pervasive and you can pretty easily create and upload spreadsheets via Google Sheets, it’s got a low barrier of entry skill wise and is free to build and deploy.
I created a couple of charts based on the same dataset I used for my app, which was very convenient. I haven’t explored some of the premade options as much in Looker Studio, but it does have some cool things like connectivity to YouTube, Search Console, and Merchant/Ecommerce Data. I’ll probably experiment more with these later down the road when I have time.
Note: If you’re viewing this post in an email (for subscribers) or the WordPress Reader, you may not be able to see the embedded app or dashboard. I think it can only be viewed in a browser, either on mobile or desktop.