Where to post questions about the Apptrix GUI-building app for Fyne?

[GwynethLlewelyn]

Hiya! 👋

My apologies in advance if I'm asking in the wrong place, but it seems not to be quite easy to find the right place...

I'm a Go fan (amateur programmer — I don't code for a living, although my 'living' often requires coding), so I thought I should give Fyne a try, and, sure enough, it works flawlessly, and it's impressive how great it is.

Alas, I'm utterly spoilt by GUI-generating tools — one of the few cases where visual programming has an edge on old-school typing.

Thus, Apptrix (formerly known as Fysion or however it used to be spelt).

Apptrix is great, of course, with lots of things to tweak and play with, and the result is, well, what one would expect: a sturdy skeleton of code that compiles fine and works out of the box, exactly what I need/want to play with. I'm essentially interested in 'reviving' ancient C++ projects done in obsolete versions of Qt, which require so much rewriting that it's easier (and more flexible, IMHO!) to rewrite them using Fyne.

However, it seems like Apptrix only supports the 'standard' set of containers & widgets. I'd love to add a few more from the fyne-x repository (namely, a file browser...!!), and, of course, some of my own design.

How exactly is this accomplished?

The 'help' is hardly useful (just three paragraphs...), but I understand that this product has been under active beta testing for around a year or so (and looks pretty solid to me). I'm sure that meant tons of discussions and explanations. But where? Apptrix, the application itself, is closed source (I think?), so I couldn't find any references directly to it — except the sparse information present on Apptrix's (the company) website, and a few odd files on Apptrix's own repository (as opposed to the one for Fyne).

Because Apptrix profusely uses Go's generate facility, I can't simply add 'a' widget — Apptrix will overwrite it the next time it's run. There must obviously be a way to avoid that behaviour. For instance, I could live without a File Browser, which, in turn, is a widget derived from a Tree (just with fancy extras). So theoretically I could just use a Tree as a 'placeholder container', and then just manually replace its calling by the File Browser's own functionality. That's fine until the project is loaded on Apptrix again — then the Tree will replace the File Browser (even if some code persists).

What I want to accomplish is to let the Apptrix application know: 'this is a different widget than a Tree, don't touch it!'

A similar issue are themes and templates. There seem to be only a limited number of choices. I wish to use my 'usual' set of colours, for instance. How do I pre-load, or save them, in order to use them later? I most certainly don't want to do that all the time from scratch!

I suppose I could tinker with the JSON code, but I don't quite get how exactly the JSON file corresponds to what is actually being generated on the file(s); I was assuming some sort of one-to-one correspondence between the files, but allegedly that's not quite the case...

Clearly, I need help here! Pointing me to a simple (or complex!) manual is, I think, what I need at this stage.

Any suggestions?

[andydotxyz]

Apptrix support is through hello@apptrix.ai or the Slack community at: https://join.slack.com/t/apptrixsupport/shared_invite/zt-2s816gcrk-ukB~txgFR9xXq9iGUEcnmQ.

The team (I'm one of them) are happy to get feedback and help work through questions.

One thing I can share though is that the JSON theme file is exactly the same format as Fyne - it uses the theme.LoadJSON call internally :).

We may open source much of Apptrix in the near future - but in the short term the focus is iterating with customers speedily.

[GwynethLlewelyn]

Thanks! Mind you, I'm not a paying customer, and I certainly hate wasting people's unpaid time 🤑

At least, placing the questions in a public place — including the answers! — means that others might benefit from the answer as well, thus diluting the cost among many people 😀

Thanks for the clarification re: the JSON theme file. In that case, I should be able to use the half-done ones I've got.

One question that remains is how to add additional widgets (from other sources) so that Apptrix recognises them as 'valid' widgets. As said, all I need (for now) is that Apptrix puts some kind of placeholder for the 'unknown' widget, even if it's non-functional.

Alas, the reverse of that question is also true: imagine that I'm using one 'standard' widget as a placeholder for something else that Apptrix doesn't (yet) know about. As said, after Apptrix does its magic, I can then go and change the layout by replacing the 'fake' widget with the 'correct' one. But the next time Apptrix refreshes that project, it will generate a set of configuration files, reverting the manual 'hack' to whatever widget was used as a placeholder.

How can this be prevented?

Last but not least, I have no problem whatsoever with commercial, closed-source products! In fact, my daily code editor/IDE is Nova — unlike 99% of all professional programmers, all of whom use VSCode (or one of its forks, such as Cursor) these days. VSCode is okay, but it's definitely hyperbloated — and, while doing everything in JavaScript is fine and portable, it simply cannot match the performance of a natively compiled product (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

[andydotxyz]

As said, after Apptrix does its magic, I can then go and change the layout by replacing the 'fake' widget with the 'correct' one. But the next time Apptrix refreshes that project, it will generate a set of configuration files, reverting the manual 'hack' to whatever widget was used as a placeholder.

Don't put customisations in the generated files - put them in the code (main.go - for example in setupActions()).

We should not put Apptrix support discussions in the Fyne issues - it will confuse from what is discussion related to the APIs that Fyne supports. I do recommend you join that Slack community - that is (for now) the only place where free support discussions happen, and the answers are available for other to read too.