CPM has been designed for coders -- but there are times when being able to shove your graphics into position on the screen is a real timer-saver, so I think it's time to implement a drag-and-drop editor.

Before I do too much more work on it, I'd like to get some feedback on what you'd like to see in such a beast.

What features would be good to have?

What does your "bare bones" graphical editor look like and what does your "pie in the sky" editor look like? :)

The more feedback the better.

Jay

that will be a great feature... :) I would love to see it.

This sounds adventurous...

For the implementation of the 'Design' area I would go with a three button split screen similar to whats found in Dreamweaver which works pretty nice - CODE / SPLIT / DESIGN.

That way everyone has the choice of just coding, just designing and of cause a split screen for both.

After that you have some good examples of layout programs already with Gumbo and the sadly missed Sprite Deck. The ability to see your assets in design view and then drag them onto the 'stage' and set properties like width, height, physics etc would be a bonus but I'm sure just getting the x and y into your code will be the first step.

But again similar to Dreamweaver as you drag and drop elements in it generates the code inside your source document would be a nice feature as not only would it help the layout process but also help with getting snippets of code quickly. Also saves on a 'Generate code' button :)

Just some thoughts that are hopefully useful,

-- Chris

Thanks for the ideas, Chris.

Here's the main problem (as I see it now) with a split screen type of deal -- CPM would have to parse and "understand" what you wrote in order to change the graphical view.

Nudging a PNG on the canvas and having code change down below isn't really a problem, but going the other way would be (I think).

As I'm still sorting out the best way to handle this I'm bumping up against the idea that while the graphical editor generates Corona SDK code, it probably needs to be code that can't be edited by the user. Well, *shouldn't* be edited by the user, because if you make changes to the code and then tweak the location of an object in the graphical editor, your changes would be overwritten.

However, the idea of a "two-way street" is very cool -- if I can figure out a good way to make it happen I will.

Jay

Very cool idea! If you could implement this, CPM would be *the* corona tool handsdown. Making it so that changes are reflected in both places would be tricky, I agree. But a killer feature, especially to do rapid stuff- paste in some code, and then quickly tweak it.

I think this is a great possible addition to an already great tool.