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Ask DN: Why are there no tools to build apps with Visual Scripting?

over 4 years ago from , Lead UI/UX Designer

This is something that has kind of baffled me for a while. In game engines, you often find node based visual scripting tools that let designers easily create functionality without requiring coding knowledge.

Good examples are probably Blueprints from Unreal Engine, uScript for Unity and FlowGraph for the CryEngine.

How come there are no such tools out there for either web development or app development? There are a lot of visual editors for web and mobile, but nothing for the logic itself.

Perhaps there is one, but I just haven't heard of it, or is there really no such product out there?

11 comments

  • Tim Knight, over 4 years ago

    Have you seen Creo?

    2 points
  • Or Arbel, over 4 years ago

    There is a product for iOS apps which is in private beta: www.animaapp.com

    2 points
  • Travis Arnold, over 4 years ago (edited over 4 years ago )

    If you know After Effects, there is a library called Body Movin that handles AE exports to Javascript https://github.com/bodymovin/bodymovin I haven't personally tried it, but there are some examples on Codepen http://codepen.io/airnan/

    0 points
  • Michael Lee, over 4 years ago

    I'm working on something like this and would be interested to hear more about how you would use such a tool or what features you are looking for.

    0 points
  • John PJohn P, over 4 years ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Inventor_for_Android

    Block based rather than node based.

    0 points
  • Jack HallahanJack Hallahan, over 4 years ago

    There is Origami for prototyping but I've not seen anything for production.

    There seems to be a tendency to think that every app is unique and can't be made by stringing together some pre-configured (but customisable) building blocks in the same way a game is.

    I like the idea though. Are you going to make one?

    0 points
    • Riho KrollRiho Kroll, over 4 years ago

      I actually think it would be easier to make apps this way, since there's a lot of common components that can easily be made into specialised nodes. Origami is so far the closest I've seen, but their focus is prototyping. Also, they're lacking any sort of layouting and design functionality, which is necessary for a product like this to be used as a production tool.

      So far the examples I've seen in this thread are extremely far away from what I have in mind. Origami is the closest, but it's built on the idea of making extremely static things, at least it seems like it would be very difficult to create dynamically populated interfaces with it.

      0 points
  • Andric ThamAndric Tham, over 4 years ago

    I was wondering that too.

    0 points