Suggestion about virtual screens

General Discussion
1

While I know the best time to use virtual screens rather than real screens was a thousand blocks ago..

With that in mind, how about adding a way to convert our cluttered projects to virtual screens? It's really difficult to transfer every real screen to a v-screen by hand- especially when you're dealing with hundreds of blocks and components. Is there a way for the App Inventor team to make this easier?

It would be cool to have a pulldown in the properties area for each component that reads: "Parent Arrangement". The default would be "Screen1". Pulling it down would reveal other vertical or horizontal arrangements you previously added that you could select. This would then place that component in that arrangement.

To easily convert your multi-screen mistake (where your Bluetooth connection doesn't work across screens.. ugh..) to virtual screens, just add new vertical arrangements to your project and name them as you would a regular screen- something like "StartScreen" or "Settings", click its parent pulldown and select "Screen1". Then for all your other real screens do the same for each component, placing them all into the parent vertical arrangement (virtual screen) of your choice.

This process would of course preserve the properties of each component as you assigned it a new parent. So many projects could be saved this way!

Is it doable? Practical?

Thanks for listening!

-Bryon

2

The 5 P's of Success: Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

“He who fails to plan, plans to fail.”

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3

Also: Post-problem professional participation promotes positive projects. :wink:

2 Likes
4

There is also

which can copy a screen and its component blocks into an Arrangement.
Procedures and globals don't come along, though.

Also, the key assignments got scrambled in the Blockly update.
(I lost track of the new keys).

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5

Thanks ABG,

Tried this today but it seems of limited utility. I could only get it to work by Shift/clicking each block stack to select multiple blocks in the blocks page, then ctrl-c and then changing to a different screen and ctrl-v. This will copy those blocks to a new screen.

This only works on the blocks page but doesn't work in the designer page. On the designer page, highlighting a component and attempting to copy/paste into another arrangement does not copy the component into the new arrangement.

-Bryon

6

Personally I would study my current App, identify things I have added that aren't really necessary, then rebuild the App from scratch with Virtual Screens. It won't take very long and the end result - lean and mean - is worth it.

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I tend to agree with you. I have been thinking about rebuilding just to get rid of the bloat and now I am motivated even more just to use v-screens. :+1:

Thanks.

-Bryon

8

Designer Copy/Paste

CTRL + C, CTRL + V

or

CTRL + INSERT, SHIFT + INSERT.