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Appmaker

appmaker.mozillalabs.com

318 pointsco_pl_te92 comments

Whoa. Definitely wasn't ready for HN-style exposure.

As bmoskowitz pointed out we have some rough words about the project. For this group, I'd in particular point out the roadmap and CONTRIBUTORS.md documents on the github repo:

  https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker/blob/master/ROADMAP.md 
  
  https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

I wrote some earlier words at https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker-words/wiki, but that's quite possibly out of date.

At the highest level, we're exploring whether it's possible to make a tool that lets non-devs (_not_ you folks!) who currently see their phones as a pure engine of consumption, as a place where they can create something fun or useful.

It's very, very early software, and it's public mostly because a) we kinda don't know how to do anything else, and b) we're going to use early and frequent user feedback to correct the aim on the product.

If people are interested, we're more than happy to entertain questions either here or on github, irc, the mailing list, etc.

Oh, and yeah, many of the components are broken, brittle, etc. This is still just a prototype.

That said, we're getting positive reactions from people close to our target audience, such as high school teachers, people teaching others how to make their first app, etc.

I'm sure we have loads of x-browser compatibility bugs, as well as known issues with respect to accessibility, absent localization, no great mechanism for contributing new components, and many more.

Oh, and the gamification bits in particular were really just testing the gamification APIs -- the levels we have in place are deeply unuseful =).

"That said, we're getting positive reactions from people close to our target audience, such as high school teachers, people teaching others how to make their first app, etc."

I bet. But this is part of the problem with many of Mozilla's products targeting the education space (Open Badges, I'm looking at you). Teachers, administrators, bureaucrats think they're the cat's meow. But (of course) they want nothing to do with the implementation details. But they do expect them to be usable.

"At the highest level, we're exploring whether it's possible to make a tool that lets non-devs (_not_ you folks!) who currently see their phones as a pure engine of consumption, as a place where they can create something fun or useful."

That's a fantastic idea. So are open badges. But "us folks" are the ones that (whether we work in edu IT, at an edtech company, or are fellow travellers) are expected to make these half-baked great ideas work, reliably, in the real world, for educators and students.

I'm not trying to rant. Mozilla has great ideas for education. But the poor (maybe I should be more generous and say incomplete) implementation of so many of these great ideas (Persona, Open Badges, and now Appmaker) is maddening when they're presented in a way that "not us folks" expect them to be available for production implementation.

Yeah, we need to do a better job of distinguishing "really early" from "ready for use". Expect a change in the landing page within a few hours (the team is currently scattered over three countries).

Some fair points—but, it's worth reiterating that there was no intent to push this out for evaluation :)

We work in the open, up to and including staging pre-alpha software on public URLs so we can gather feedback in-progress.

In this case, we were showing this off in super early state at a company summit. Word of mouth appears to be powerful!

I'm your target market. Apart from my tech company, where I'm definitely not the technical founder, I also own a consulting company and construction firm. I've been patching together solutions with excel, trello, google calendar, etc, and this is exactly what i need.

Get it working, I always need tools customized to a particular task that a simple app would solve.

Sometimes, the best tool is a hammer...

I love this comment. "Get it working". Roger wilco!

What types of apps are you trying to create?

"Oh wow, that seems neat. I should check that out"

clicks link on Hacker News

"Hmm, not sure what this is about. I'll just hit the 'Start' button"

Hits start button. 'Add a button' dialog pops up

"That seems pretty straight forward, I'll just add drag that thing labelled 'Button' from the left window pane, on to what looks like a smartphone"

Drags button over. Gets 'Congratulations' box

"Wow, this is really intuitive so far. With a little effort, something like this would be a real game changer in the mobile space!"

New dialog pops up: 'Add a randomcat component to your app

Looks around for anything labelled 'randomcat'

"Huh, thats strange. I wondered if it's labelled something else and I'm just missing it"

Looks for 'random', 'cat', 'Cat.random()', and any other possible combination

"Wtf mate?"

Gives up and leaves

Looks like a bug. I tried it out and it had a component called 'randomcat' on that part. It was just as straightforward as the button. But I just tried it again to take a screenshot to show you, and it didn't come up.

This was my exact thought process. Tried again and a bunch of new widgets showed up :shrugs:

I got passed the randomCat but got stuck trying to add the 1 star rating

I think you need to add a button. Same thing in level 4 with fireworks.

I added a star gadget and a submit button. No joy.

Yer I added a star rating and clicked the 1, nothing happened, gave up.

It's like that Simon Says game. You have to complete all the previous steps plus the current one in order to progress to the randomcatfireworksratingsplosionbutton final stage, at which point you are deemed worthy of conquering the app store. If only I could get some kind of Mozilla Appmaker certification badge...

Same thing here. Even tried other stuff like the image gallery.

LOL, yes, this is exactly what I did. It felt like I wasn't supposed to be seeing what I was seeing, like the software was some kind of funny inside joke at Mozilla or something.

All I could think after that was - Is Random Cat funny? Is this something I should know as a developer? Am I out of some loop?

At any rate, it was so odd I just decided not to do anything else, and left. I think they goofed here, but once it's fixed, I'm sure people will go back.

That being said, it does go down as possibly the biggest tutorial fail I've seen to date - and I'm a little shocked given the source.

There is a GREAT lesson to be learned from this - and that's probably that leaving strange humor out of sign-up processes and tutorials is a good idea. I've seen other sign-ups that try to be "funny" and it just throws me off.

Agreed. Reminds me of a joke at the end of Django tutorial[1]:

    Coming soon

    The tutorial ends here for the time being. Future installments of the tutorial will cover:

    * Advanced form processing
    * Using the RSS framework
    * Using the cache framework
    * Using the comments framework
    * Advanced admin features: Permissions
    * Advanced admin features: Custom JavaScript

I get it now. It now seems kinda funny. But when I was new to Django, I thought it was serious. I used to visit the page once in a while to check if new tutorials have been added yet. Fortunately, 1.4 was the last version which included this "joke".

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/intro/tutorial04/#comi...

Sorry, but I don't get this. Care to explain?

Try a bit harder. Within a couple minutes it becomes obvious how it works. At least to me.

Exactly the experience I had...

I think I said this in another comment, but the gamification levels were really just to test our gamification APIs, the levels are not at all right, or useful. We'll remove that ASAP.

done.

That's fast, nice! I wonder if you could "anonymize" the phone, which looks too much like an Apple device for my taste. I think Mozilla has always shown the right direction for net neutrality, and trademark neturality is also important in my mind.

Ha. It's intended to look like a FirefoxOS phone if anything =)

Wow, you got dialog boxes? Lucky you...

exactly what I did

"Mozilla Appmaker is a pre-alpha concept"

By the common understanding of alpha, pre alpha means its not really ready to demo.

True, but most of all we value working in the open so that we can both do user testing and find people who might want to contribute. In my book our mistake was not to prioritze issues 306 and 386 until we showed up on HN. Oh well!

Can I suggest not using alpha/beta - they are labels used to indicate the state of a proprietary project - how "polished" it is - whereas you are continuously exploring. if you must I suggest using a target audience - contributors, early adopters. etc etc

Actually, the Randomcat came in very useful for CatChat: http://habitual-cracker-680.appalot.me/install.html

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).

Hi Thanks for the note, I watched the video and it makes more sense now.

I know you said firefox desktop was not the main focus, but I have a chrome packaged app that I'd love to port over to firefox OS

is there a good guide / overview of doing this?

Hi hayksaakian - one of my colleagues just posted this: http://onecyrenus.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/rockin-the-free-w...

I liked what I saw.

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? :)

Thanks, great set of feedback. A bunch of these need to find their ways into our issues list!

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.

This is my use case for this too. It would be absolutely perfect for quick and easy web-app remote controls.

From someone peripherally involved in the project:

This is an open source project, community-built from the beginning. It's pre-alpha. Pre-pre alpha, even. There has been no public launch or fanfare. That's why you'll see no blog posts or explanatory text yet, why many of the components don't work, and why the tutorials aren't built.

But it's cool to see that it's already found its way to HN.

It's meant to be like Hypercard for mobile apps.

If you want to learn more, check out the repo:

https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker

or the vision stub / wiki:

https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker-words/wiki

Since nobody can seem to figure it out -- As near as I can tell, this is a not-quite-fully working app-maker demo, that 'publishes' to static HTML and Javascript files hosted on Amazon S3.

The gamified GUI is a little bit confusing, and you end up with a resulting 'app' (that sometimes takes a few reloads to work, oddly) with an Install button that doesn't seem to do anything yet -- but which I suspect will be a link to save 'as an app' icon to your mobile phone's homescreens.

It's not fully baked, at the moment, and it appears that some of the widgets aren't loading, but it's definitely a neat proof of concept, that was either leaked early, or is for some reason swamped under load, or something.

Yup, thanks for jumping in, that's a good summary.

Sadly, as it seems to be the comment I leave most these days, it doesn't work on mobile browsers. At least mobile Safari.

I understand that there are some interfaces that aren't meant for mobile. There are some that aren't meant for desktop. But at a minimum, you have to make some small effort to give a message to those visiting from unsupported platforms. It shows that you care.

If it doesn't seem like you care about the experience I'm having with your product then I have no motivation to go back and try it again.

We care, we really do -- just haven't gotten around to that part yet!

Filed as https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker/issues/387, thanks.

We're actually very interested in mobile browsers, so much so that in fact we've got plans (with no code to back them up yet) to let people author apps wholly on a phone.

Please! Resubmit a link when the mobile version is ready. Again, I don't care if it works or not. All I'm saying is that since we're all browsers at some level we support basic html. Just put a notice it ain't ready for mobile and that's good enough.

The seed for the entire idea was actually people in mobile-first environments—developing countries, etc—and helping empower them to make software for themselves and their communities.

We started with desktop authoring, and it's been a useful step on the way to a mobile-first UI.

Will be really cool when people can generate apps on their phones, publish and share them, using only touch.

I couldn't figure out the Cat.random thing. I'm pretty sure I could code a Firefox mobile app from scratch, but that UI is confusing, though pretty.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one, the whole concept looks really interesting, but for a walkthrough, the Cat.random thing is kind of confusing.

There is a widget called as randomcat... took some time to figure it out.

I can only see the suggested widgets, I'm guessing the rest of the widgets must be somewhere else... (Chrome v29)

P.S. I was able to get random cats by using a button and a flickr though, it didn't work either.

It hangs on the "Loading" animation to the left of the screen. Chrome 30.0.1599.69 m, Win8x64.

Console output:

    Unexpected identifier in definition of component "app-image-gallery". ceci.js:502
    SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier
        at Window.Function (<anonymous>)
        at Ceci.processComponent (http://appmaker.mozillalabs.com/vendor/ceci/ceci.js:497:19)
        at Array.forEach (native)
        at processComponents (http://appmaker.mozillalabs.com/vendor/ceci/ceci.js:541:16)
        at XMLHttpRequest.xhr.onload (http://appmaker.mozillalabs.com/vendor/ceci/ceci.js:573:15) ceci.js:503
    Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier in definition of component "app-image-gallery". ceci.js:497

I got the same thing when cookies were blocked. Try with cookies enabled (if yours weren't). Worked for me.

(Of course, if you routinely browse without cookies, you'd probably guess this quickly.)

Maybe change the icon (think it's still using the default express icon), and the drag/drop doesn't work for me:

Google Chrome 30.0.1599.66 (Official Build 225456) OS Linux Blink 537.36 (@158213) JavaScript V8 3.20.17.13

Filed: https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker/issues/389

Thanks a bunch, I kept dragging and dropping, thinking I was doing something collosally wrong

As someone that makes tools like this for a living (Codiqa and Jetstrap), and I have to say it's quite well done. Nice work, and I'm sure the bugs will get ironed out.

Thanks, that's very kind!

This entire experience was quite opague. I can't figure out if it's a game or some GUI for basic apps or what.

I lost interest fairly quickly, and half of the components seemed broken.

Yeah, not yet ready for primetime. This hasn't launched yet, and won't for a while. But you can look under the hood:

https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker

and check out where we're intending to go:

https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker-words/wiki

"I can't figure out if it's a game or some GUI for basic apps or what."

That seems rather disingenuous in light of:

"I lost interest fairly quickly, and half of the components seemed broken."

Seems that you figured out what it was after all, if you knew those were components.

Nothing wrong with negative feedback if it's constructive, but this seems to be a response in the category of "I couldn't be bothered to actually think before I wrote".

Doesn't seem to work in Chromium... I just get a "loading" message in the bar on the left side.

Firefox too, probably not browser-specific.

I could publish a very simple app, but I'm not sure where I can "install" it? Mobile Firefox maybe? Anyway, pretty neat visuals but a bit of lack of documentation right now. But I assume it's not yet ready to use as they did not communicate on this right now.

Yes Firefox mobile. Tools -> Apps lists all apps

Also can install it on Firefox Desktop

Interesting. What I'd like is a chrome packaged app to Firefox app porting guide.

That'd seal the deal for me.

The tutorial crashed for me, but after a refresh I made an app that took a photo and stored it in a gallery. There seems to be a lack of useful widgets, and few ways to customise them. It certainly has potential though, and I'll be showing some of my students on Monday

Looks neat, However, the widgets are not loading for me.

Ditto, using Chrome 30. Going to try Firefox, then will see if it's some HTTP request not working.

Edit: Working in Chrome now.

with webkit here it did not load on the tutorial but loaded when i quit it.

That makes two of us.

Loading the site in an Incognito window fixed the problem for me. AdBlock or something might be stopping some scripts from loading.

Indeed, we have a weird intermittent failure on component loading that we haven't figured out yet. A few reloads tends to work, as a temporary workaround.

Interesting that it always hangs on "Loading..." with Firefox 24, but always works with Chromium 29 ...

Did I miss something? Is there no way to get any of these components' broadcast channels to GET/POST to an API? Or their input channels to accept an HTTP input? I couldn't see this on the roadmap and it seems like such a no brainer that I then figured it was already baked in and I just couldn't find the GUI element to trigger it. Now I'm confused.

If such a thing were added I would use this every single time I end up making a crappy little html webpage to drive something. I've lost count of the number of these I've made.

Cool - Created a simple app and pushed the app to Firefox on Android

Using Chrome 30 on OS X, I am getting the following error when trying to play the video:

"[blocked] The page at https://appmaker.mozillalabs.com/ ran insecure content from http://www.youtube.com/embed/RaRIdLgZTPI?autoplay=1."

I assume it's not quite done. I liked the channels for publishing things, lots of little rough edges, but it seems like a neat idea in general.

This reminds me a lot of Android App Inventor. The main difference is that app inventor is a bit more advanced programming wise.

Indeed, we're inspired by AppInventor. We're aiming at higher level components and a more simplistic model.

I look at something half baked like this and my first thought is "I wish Steve Jobs didn't kill HyperCard"

I liked the idea of channels with colors and connecting components with it. Although it is primitive as it is, if it evolves it can be used as a great mock-up tool at the least. It is mistake to consider it for people who program for a living. Let's not shoot down ideas/concepts/proof of concepts.

It's clearly being built right now. I get different pages at different times.

This is what I see as soon as the page opens: http://i.imgur.com/XQlQfXl.jpg?1

Note that it's hard to read the white text in the foreground.

I really like the concept of building apps out of widgets connected by broadcast events. It reminds me of meemoo (http://meemoo.org/).

nice Signals/Slot mechanism, similar to Qt. The color of the line needs to be matched to connect a signal to a slot. Customization of signals/slots seems to be not supported atm.

That's right—and the priority is to let people with little or no progamming experience make their own mobile apps. Think Hypercard.

We're shipping a bunch of starter components to begin. In the future, we're looking at opening to contributors to submit their own components. We may have some advanced component editing at some point in the future, but the priority is a delightful experience for people who don't know how to code.

As the kids say nowadays: what is this, I don't even...

So how long does it take before the widgets are loaded?

Tried it out, one star rating does not work for me.

I think this should be the normal way that devs build apps. There just needs to be a good and easy way to author components.

I accidentally invented iphone mark 55

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