About

mlAppKit was written to enhance app development workflow.

The general idea is to bridge the gap between the highly customizable but intensely laborious and bug-prone programmatic way and the comfy drag and drop way using App Designer. App Designer is going to abbreviated by AD.

Background

Mathworks Developers did a great job in creating AD. It was the first GUI design tool I worked with which obviously results in a bias towards it. Compared to other methods to create desktop apps a couple of points are unsatisfying:

  • creating apps is easy-peasy, combining existing applications into a single app can get very messy.

  • the coding experience in AD is pretty weak and gets quite sluggish passing a system specific magic number of lines

  • the structuring capabilities layers are weak

  • code folding mostly unavailable

The apps you get are monstrous monolithic which are:

  • bug prone

  • hard to read

  • agglomerate useless code

  • and lower IDE performance with increasing the code size

An other approach is that you might have a couple of apps which are started a single master app. This keeps every sub app independent. but having ten application windows on your desktop is not undesirable. On how many windows are you going to focus anyway?

While I was creating some apps for myself I realized that most of what I created was single use quality. This is very sad since the rock bottom of .mlapp apps are classes which are intended to be reusable objects.

Trying to get more experience I used tools like:

  • Android Studio

  • Java Swing

  • Qt Designer

  • various pythonic ways e.g. tkinter, beeware

Qt would be my weapon of choice professional apps. Obviously Android Studio is for mobile only. Java Swing … Java… It’s bad enough that we are using MatLab.

How is this done?

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Feedback

I would certainly enjoy developing it further. But I will need your feedback.

  • GitHub issues

  • Send me an email

Support

Issues can be open on Github Or contact me at erkan.dem@pm.me