The number 1 feature I think would elevate our ability to develop apps is the ability to manipulate “Objects” that same way you manipulate Variables (Data Manipulation). You should be able to change properties of buttons, shapes, pictures, text, etc. Some important ones:
Via a trigger, ability to Toggle visibility. (Or change Opacity)
Via a trigger, ability to change Color Hex.
Via a trigger, ability to change text on buttons. (Button text should be treated the same as text on top of a button)
Via a trigger, ability to change X/Y Coordinates. (This is a game design trick that would allow us to perform some digital “Sleight of Hand” and could replace all the previous features listed here by having duplicate buttons that moved off screen when not in use. You would also need to increase the area around the Canvas to place items.)
This would make it easier to create dynamic apps that could change depending on conditions. E.g. the continue button is red until conditions have been met.Once the conditions have been met, the red button moves off screen and the green button moves on screen. The green button has different triggers than the red, creating different interactions.
Ability to make any object a button.
For example, currently a circular object has to have a square button.
Ability to add widgets the replicate form step fields to an object. (Form steps are the worst.)
Some less important ones:
On trigger, visually depress button (or add drop shadow to mimic depression)
These are all incredible suggestions. I know that some of the aspects mentioned here have been submitted to the product team for review, and I am happy to submit all the aspects above that are not already noted. We appreciate your request greatly!
Great suggestions Brad. It is possible to do some of these by using tables, variables and overlaying buttons and adding if logic, but overall it requires a lot of leg work to accomplish. Enabling these features will reduce the time required to build complex applications.
I know that this is an old thread, but BradNichols has basically read my mind.
I’m especially interested at the moment in the ability to programmatically changes aspects of widgets, like their size and the font size of their embedded text.
Was there any progress on implementing those features?
@Aquamaofian, thanks for resurrecting this thread! This is a great question.
In the time since this first post we made a lot of progress here. Instead of building this functionality natively into widgets, we built a custom widgets feature that allows you to build the exact widget you’re looking for from scratch. I’m not aware of folks manipulating widget size and font size, but I’ll check with the rest of the team and see if there are good examples out there in the community.
You can learn more here. You should also check out the custom widget category in the Community, and download a few custom widgets as examples from the Library.
There’s also an old school method for this that we called the “SVG Hack”, which was the option before custom widgets. Check out that video if you can get custom widgets to work.
@thorsten.langner, my understanding is that it’s not possible to change the size of the widget itself. That said, folks here have constantly impressed me with with their creativity, so I wanted to leave open the possibility that there’s a work around or a hack that I’m not aware of for achieving the same effect.
