If you don't know IDX, you should read more about it!

In short, it's development workspace in the cloud.
Not interested because cloud development environments are not new?
Stop reading and have a nice day

IDX is different!
It's still beta, but it's so cool and it already works. The cool thing is the architecture and the visions behind it.

We tried different cloud dev environments in the past but IDX is the first which worked like expected. One click and everything will be up and running, super fast, easy to manage (because it just works).

Our use-case is simple. Create a mobile demo app with Flutter UI like our example app.

It was super easy because copy/paste of source files was enough. Here's the result:

Flutter UI Android preview

Flutter UI Web preview

To be honest, it wasn't possible to develop without manual configuration because supported flutter version was too old. But a simple

fixed this problem. The Android emulator preview had some problems and didn't work at first but it suddenly worked. We have no idea why, but IDX is beta. The overall performance is not super fast but the IDE part itself is fast enough. The preview and build could be better. Also the Android simulator integration lacks.

But if everything would be configured by a custom template, your online IDE is ready in 30 seconds - ready to work.

For us it's not a replacement for desktop development but it's perfect for collaboration or if you need complex environments e.g. docker, databases. It makes sense to create a development environment in some seconds and share the environment with your team or just to provide a development environment for Low-Code citizen developers. Not every citizen developer has the skill to configure a development environment. But a click on a link and modifying existing files is not a problem.

If you're interested, just try out IDX on your own.

With next VisionX Previewer release we'll have a really useful feature. It's an automatic feedback in case of unexpected application errors.

It's entirely possible that the app can't handle all use cases equally well. This can lead to overflows or even unexpected display issues. Usually your users won't report such problems if they don't persist. For such cases, we have implemented an automated feedback handling. Any unexpected issues are reported automatically. The application will send the internal error message and stack trace to the backend and a Screenshot of the current application if possible.

Examples:

Text overflow

Exceptions

This will be reported to the backend e.g.

Overflow feedback

Exceptions feedback

No worries, it's just a demo screen. It doesn't look fancy. Just use VisionX to create your own cool screen.

Our feedback handling is not comparable with commercial products like Sentry.io which is the recommended system in the flutter docs. But it's simple, free and built-in. If you use our flutter client as base of your own application client it's also possible to use other reporting systems like Sentry.io without any limitations.

We always try to keep things simple for you!

We work hard on our VisionX Previewer app and have some really cool new features for you

You know that we use a table for data representation. It looks like following:

Standard table

We know that a table is not really cool on mobile devices. A table on mobile devices often looks like a list, like this one:

Our problem was the layout of the list elements. This is easy for a table but complex for a list. Anyway, we found a super flexible solution for the problem and now it's possible to show a table as list, like following:

Table as List

You don't need to change your application to show a table as list, just add a style information to your existing tables and everything will work. The list supports same features as the table. It's sortable, editable and you can delete records. The list has some additional style options like as Card, with + button, with border, with arrow:

Style options

This is the default layout implementation of the list. If you want another layout, you can use a template mechanism to create your own customized list. The template is a json file which defines the layout. It's not super easy but with a little patience it will work.

The new list feature will be available together with the next VisionX update in some weeks, because the template mechanism is new and not available in older VisionX versions.