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 [email protected] 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.