CIQ Layout Composer - A visual tool to help create, experiment and generate UI code

Former Member over 9 years ago

I've created a new open source tool that I hope can be of interest to the Garmin Connect IQ Developer community.

This is a specific tool I've created to assist Garmin Connect IQ developers when creating user interfaces (views). This tool enables developers to create a user interface in an editor while previewing the end result in the simulator app. When finished, you can also generate the view code to copy into your own application to get started.

It consists of:

A REST Api
A web based editor to edit layouts (views) and their drawable elements.
A Connect IQ project to run in the simulator, viewing items while editing.

NB! While this tool is fully usable now, it requires you to clone the Github project and run all required development tools. The intention is to be able to deploy this to a web server, making it far more accessible to all Connect IC developers. For those of you that are able to run this tool, please feel free to contribute on Github in making this a solid tool.

The project can be found here:
https://github.com/hakonrossebo/ciq-layout-composer

Show and tell:

Former Member over 9 years ago

I've updated the initial post to also describe that it is possible to generate Connect IQ code based on the created elements.

-To any forum moderators - is it possible to change the thread title from "CIQ Layout Composer" to "CIQ Layout Composer - A visual tool to help create, experiment and generate user interface code."?

Brandon.ConnectIQ over 9 years ago

There's a title length limit, so I had to change "user interface" to "UI" to make it fit, but I changed the thread title for you. :)

Former Member over 9 years ago

Thanks :)

I've also updated the project to run in separate Docker containers now. It should be quite easy to get the project running without interfering with your own machine.

PedlarStudios over 9 years ago

I'm surprised this hasn't got more response, nice job! I always end up going back to the documentation many times when designing a layout for Connect IQ so this would probably be a quicker method for me with the fast feedback. I'm working on a Connect IQ project so I will hopefully be able to try this out this week.

Former Member over 9 years ago

Thank you for your comment. It's really helpful for me to get this kind of feedback to help me knowing if this can be a useful tool for developers, and worth the extra effort of taking this further.

Btw - I've used you'r Log4MonkeyC project on my Football Fixtures app and it really improved logging a lot when debugging errors and code flow in different classes.