A Web-based WYSIWYG editor for automation routines
manganiello.social
manganiello.social
I did some small jobs nearly two decades ago introducing school kids to programming through Scratch and the Lego Mindstorm IDE, and I've been toying since then with the idea of implementing a drag-and-drop, block-based and general-purpose UI to lower the barriers to coding. This has been a chance to finally follow-up on those intentions.
Platypush also still provides extensibility through Python scripts for more complex routines that can't be easily modelled through a block-based interface.
Keep in mind though that I'm no UX expert (I'm mostly a backend guy who can do some UI, not the other way around), and least of all I'm an expert of block-based interfaces and drag-and-drop, especially when it comes to a11y, so feel free to provide feedback.
- a standalone app
- could create standard GUI elements
- had a decent library of packages which could be imported at need
I have been using:
https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/
quite a lot (but it quit generating 3D previews of my projects a while back)
I'm hoping that:
will get to this point --- it seems promising enough I've been funding it since it was first announced.
Extensibility is a good point, and one that at some point I could implement. So far the block paradigm I've implemented only covers the primitive statements supported by Platypush' procedures (action, set, if, else, for, while, break, continue, return). But extensibility can definitely be a big win here - although extensibility means that the semantic of the new statement/block needs to be encoded both on the backend and the frontend (the frontend for example needs to know that I can't create a block after a return, or that break is only allowed within a loop).