8base | Product Update - September 2023

Building a product of 8base’s magnitude is no simple undertaking. It’s a labor of love fueled by our mission to transform how web applications are built.

We’re excited to bring you the latest news regarding the 8base Platform. Over the past few months, the 8base team has been hard at work, driven by the following objectives:

• Ensuring we deliver on our promise of Radical Productivity and Uninhibited Development.
• Refining our developer experience from first contact with our product to deploying applications and beyond.
• Enabling the full-stack experience with the 8base Backend and App Builder.
• Expanding our component and feature offering.

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Radical Productivity

Radical Productivity begins with a fast system. To this end, App Builder is 50-90% faster! Our Backend is not only 30% faster, it is even more resilient and scalable, supporting applications with hundreds of thousands of users.

In addition to these improvements, we've introduced the ability to clone pages, which reduces the effort it takes to create something similar to what you already have. Users can now also select and edit multiple components at the same time. Plus, with our revamped Page Structure Pane, handling a multitude of components has become more streamlined.

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Uninhibited Development

At 8base, Uninhibited Development means always allowing developers to insert code where needed; however, in an age where product design is table stakes, we’ve worked hard to ensure 8base allows complete styling control. Here are some of the new enhancements:

Save as Global CSS

You can now use the "Save as Global CSS" feature, which with just one click, refactors component styles into global CSS classes. 

Copy/Paste Component Styles

Maintain a consistent and visually appealing design across your project by rapidly applying styles from one component to another.

Swap Colors in Themes

Users now have the ability to effortlessly switch between background and foreground colors.

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Real-Time Collaboration

Witnessing how fast solo developers can build sophisticated applications using full-stack 8base has been amazing. That said, development remains a team sport, so we’ve enabled some incredible real-time collaboration capabilities. Try them for yourself and see how quickly multiple users—developers, designers, product managers, and more—simultaneously contribute to the same assets in a project. We made App Builder completely resilient even when Internet disruptions happen mid-stream. These features enable pair programming, live code reviews, and productivity boosts.

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Component Library

Driven by external and internal development demands, we’ve continued to expand our component library; and many of our existing components have been enhanced to support additional capabilities:

• Versatile File Upload options including a File Picker, File Drop Zone, and more.
• A powerful Rich Text Editor that allows for comprehensive text capture and display.
• A Rating Component for capturing valuable user feedback.
• A Map Component for including geography-based visualizations in your applications.
• A Snackbar Component for enabling toast notifications in applications.
• A Speed Dial to present a floating action button that displays three to six related actions.

We’ve also added a primitive HTML Component Set designed for instances where you need bottom-up control of the component, and many others, including a Date/Time Picker, Autocomplete, Custom Icon Loader, Floating Action Button, and more.

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Refinement

More than 200 refinements and bug fixes have been made to the product since we last communicated with you. Many of these were driven by our observations of users utilizing 8base daily; however, we also have a significant team inside of 8base building applications, using our toolset everyday, resulting in the perfection of many capabilities.

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API Explorer (Backend)

We’ve added some new capabilities in API Explorer to enable viewing the Data Graph and quickly export code using our Code Exporter tool. These additions offer enhanced control and flexibility over your projects.

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Wrap Up

These features—and much more—are the results of your feedback.

So, if it’s been a while since you last explored 8base, drop in. Your engagement and feedback catalyze our innovation—helping us push the boundaries of what’s possible in application development.

Expect to hear from us soon on even more cool and empowering capabilities as we are working on the next wave of new features.

Happy Developing 🚀

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