Hey HN, if you're curious about this, I suggest you watch this video (http://youtu.be/RaRIdLgZTPI) which shows a quick demo, and/or:
- opt out of the levels thing on first load, it's not ready.
- instead, jump straight in the designer and run through these few steps:
- drag & drop a button, click on it, notice it sends out messages on the blue channel
- D&D a counter, notice that it listens to a blue channel, and that the button clicks cause it to increment (that's how we "program" these components
- D&D another button, make it emit on a different color, and configure the counter to "count down" on that color. That way one button increments, the other decrements
- D&D the fireworks component, configure its "shoot this many rockets" to a third color (and clear "shoot rocket); make the counter emit on that color. Enjoy the fireworks show.
- Other components that work well for understanding things are:
- ratings widget
- input widget connected to a map widget will center the map on a place name (although HN will likely exceed the limits on our usage of the OSM server; need to setup another one =()
- flickr widget can do both topic and location searches
Let us know if you have ideas for components we should build (or submit a PR!).
The publish button will create "hosted apps" which can be installed on FirefoxOS, Firefox for Android, and incidentally recent builds of Firefox desktop, although the focus for Appmaker is very much mobile apps).
This looks promising. I would love to see a basic HTTP component which can recieve broadcasts and in its simplest form perform HTTP GET to a specified URL. Also with the possibility to broadcast the response from this HTTP GET request to another component.
I am playing around with a Raspberry PI / Arduino solution and the PI has a webserver which relays commands to the Arduino. Now, it would be very neat to have a mobile app to trigger these commands. For example, pushing a button to turn a light on or off. As I do have minimal time creating GUIs, this tool, with the flexibility of a HTTP module, would be perfect to use for prototyping such solutions.
This could be used to trigger commands as described above, but also possibly for embedding content from other sites etc.
Probably not where you wanna go with this tool, but it would be neat for situations where you want a quick GUI to control stuff.
Sure, it's a bit rough around the edges, but it is a brilliant thing for non-devs to play around with. With a little tinkering sround, I managed to create a simple chatroom app: http://truthful-week-478.appalot.me/install.html
Here're my first impressions:
1. The color flow as a broadcast-reception link is an interesting idea but not immediately intuitive. Once I figure out what it was for, I managed to blaze through it fairly quickly.
2. Broadcast trigger actions need to be clearer. For instance, I know there a trigger for the randomcat but the fact that clicking the random cat is the trigger isn't all that intuitive.
3. Make chaining triggers a thing? I know it's not as easy as it seems but some combinations do lend themselves to chained triggers. For instance, I wanted to emit the random cat to the chat room with each text (as a test) but there was no way to chain triggers.
4. Publishing the app seems to lose the custom name assigned to form buttons. The app I posted above should say "Clear Chat" where it says submit.
5. Allow me to save my apps under a custom name? And publish the changes to the same app after Edit? Not sure about the latter - haven't tried it yet.
Overall, it is a brilliant achievement for something that is pre-alpha or pre-pre-alpha! I'd like to see where this leads!
I am now heading back to construct a simple clicker game. Wish me luck! :D
EDIT: Both Chrome & Firefox seem to throw errors about a few js files (primarily ceci.js & designer.js) in the console while loading the page for the first time. CTRL+F5 solves it. JS caching issue, I'm guessing? :)
- opt out of the levels thing on first load, it's not ready. - instead, jump straight in the designer and run through these few steps:
- drag & drop a button, click on it, notice it sends out messages on the blue channel - D&D a counter, notice that it listens to a blue channel, and that the button clicks cause it to increment (that's how we "program" these components - D&D another button, make it emit on a different color, and configure the counter to "count down" on that color. That way one button increments, the other decrements
- D&D the fireworks component, configure its "shoot this many rockets" to a third color (and clear "shoot rocket); make the counter emit on that color. Enjoy the fireworks show.
- Other components that work well for understanding things are:
- ratings widget - input widget connected to a map widget will center the map on a place name (although HN will likely exceed the limits on our usage of the OSM server; need to setup another one =() - flickr widget can do both topic and location searches
Let us know if you have ideas for components we should build (or submit a PR!).
The publish button will create "hosted apps" which can be installed on FirefoxOS, Firefox for Android, and incidentally recent builds of Firefox desktop, although the focus for Appmaker is very much mobile apps).