Is there a plan to support UI elements?

Scriptable
1

I’m new to scriptable, thanks for providing this awesome app! I have a few questions regarding the user interface.

I know scriptable supports UITableView, WKWebView, and UIAlertController, etc. But it seems there isn’t a well-designed UI system behind.

What I mean is that do we have a plan to support creating more flexible UI elements? Such as controls (label, button, textField…), layout mechanism, and user event binding, etc.

What do you think? @simonbs

2

First of all hi and welcome to the forum :blush:

I think it’s a really good idea and it’s something I’m looking into. I want to be as open as I can about the plans for Scriptable but it’s still a bit too early for me to say much more about this :speak_no_evil:

Thanks for your feedback. I really appreciate it. It’s really helpful to know which features people are :pray:

3

If you have any particular use cases in mind, then I’d love to hear about it so I can take it into consideration when I get further with this.

For example, what data would you want to show and what interactions do you need? In which contexts would you primarily use this, eg. in the app, in Siri or in Shortcuts?

It’s also totally fair if you don’t have any particular use cases in mind right now but would just like to see the option added to the app :blush:

4

Thanks for the quick reply!

Actually, I don’t have a very clear particular use case for that idea, just curious about how scriptable would be in the future.

On the other side, some apps like Pythonista (sorry about mentioning similar apps) provides a UI module that allows you to do that. You can even create a simple “app” based on that.

I’m wondering, is scriptable an app for simple user interactions + data processing, or providing more flexibility for general project?

Thanks.

1 Like
5

The Pythonista point is a good one…

While I haven’t built any UI automation in Pythonista, I’m more likely to build some with a UI in Scriptable if it had UI support beyond the current.

And people are losing faith in Pythonista so this is fertile ground. I think many people see Scriptable as the “next generation” Pythonista.

6

Are they? I only ask as there is a 3.3 beta, so there is still active development.

I think it is also worth noting that it was quite a while after release that Pythonista got the UI build features (v1.5, but I think the release cycle was much lower, 1.5 being mid-2014 and 1.0 being early 2012 I think), so being a road mapped set of functionality that’s so big for an app as young as Scriptable would be more than reasonable at this point.

7

I was basically being “encouraging”.

I don’t think Pythonista is in as bad shape as Editorial, though I think people who want automation rather than programming are likely to view Scriptable as the “spiritual successor” to it.

It does, of course, depend on how you view Python vs Javascript. (I can, and do, use both. But I don’t think Javascript / Scriptable yet has such a wide set of libraries. .e.g CSV - my fave, and I’ve rolled my own.)

8

I can’t quite agree with that. There are endless packages on npm. Yes, of course they are made for node and/or browser, but the most popular ones are made as a UMD module, which means that they work in Node and browser at the same time, without any changes. If they also don’t rely on DOM properties or from Node, which is generally the case for UMD modules, then there is nothing to stop them from working in Scriptable. For example moment.js or csv2json from csvjson.com

I would also like to play with more UI elements :smile:

1 Like