How do we keep track of improvements to an App during Development? Or should we Publish it even though it’s not ready for production use? Snapshot in Development doesn’t seem to be very helpful. Metadata would be good to show last time App was modified etc in development. Am I missing something obvious here? This is our first App and we haven’t really gone to production yet.
Hi Mark,
You are not missing anything. Tulip does not track detailed changes inside the development version. The main way to keep a history during development is to publish versions or create snapshots.
Publishing creates a frozen copy of your work with a version number and a timestamp. You can publish even if the app is not ready for production, as long as you do not assign that version to any stations.
You can also use Snapshots if you want to save a checkpoint without publishing.
Create and manage app versions
https://support.tulip.co/docs/create-and-manage-app-versions
Publish and run apps
https://support.tulip.co/docs/publish-and-run-apps
These are the tools most teams use to track progress and document changes while they are still building their first app.
Hi Nicolo,
Thanks for the reply. I think I’ll try publishing as a simple way to track my progress. As you say I can control what stations have access to what. Right now a lot of this is like Ross on Friends leaving phone messages to himself (you’ll be too young for that probably, lol). I’d be Ross in this scenario and Tulip publishing is my voicemail….
Where should I keep notes about what changes/improvements have been made?
Hi Mark,
Tulip doesn’t currently have a built-in place to store development change notes. Most teams keep notes externally (Google Doc, Notion, spreadsheet, etc.) and tie them to each published version.
A common approach is to publish versions as checkpoints and maintain a simple change log with the version number, date, and a short summary of changes. This works well even before the app is production-ready, as long as versions aren’t assigned to stations.
One helpful tip: You can use the “Resources” view on the App Versions page to see when each version was published and by whom, which can help correlate with your external change log.
That’s generally the recommended workflow during early development.