Preview
The appdoo Preview App can be downloaded for free from the Apple App Store.
The appdoo Preview App offers a live preview of your appdoo project running as a native iOS app on any supported iOS device. This allows you to test your app in realtime while creating and modifying it, without having to install any additional developer tools like Xcode.
As soon as you launch the iOS app while an appdoo for macOS instance is already running an appdoo project on the same WiFi network, you’ll notice that…
- The iOS app will automatically open the project which is currently shown by the macOS app.
- In appdoo, at the bottom of the workspace of each screen view, there is a device bar that lists all available appdoo preview apps. You can dis- and reconnect any reachable iOS preview device using this device bar.
Please keep in mind that…
- both devices – the mac running the macOS designer app and the iOS device running the Preview app – have to be connected to the same WiFi network.
- the iOS device has to be reachable via WiFi and the Preview app has to be running for the device to appear inside the project’s device bar
- appdoo is designed to be used in a setup where one single instance of the macOS designer app is providing projects to one or more mobile devices for preview purposes - within the same local area network (LAN) that is. There may be unintended connections when using multiple macOS app instances within the same network. You can prevent that by deselecting all devices in the respective project’s device bar, but this setting is discarded when you relaunch the respective iOS preview app instance.
- the device selector in the lower right corner of the macOS app’s project overview screen has no effect on the iOS Preview app but lets you select the previewed screen size used by the macOS app itself.
Resources
Please note that resources (images, movies etc.) with a size over 10 MB are not transferred to the preview app. We have introduced this limitation in order not to affect the performance of the display during development.
If you have the appropriate resources in your project, you will see the following message on your iOS device when you start the Preview App:
When exporting, the resources will of course be included again.
Troubleshooting
- if your iOS devices should drop its WiFi connection and fails to automatically reopen the project on reconnect, you can do so at any given time by going to the project’s overview screen inside the macOS app and clicking on the respective device inside the device bar at the bottom of the window. The device name should turn blue when successfully connected.
- this way of reconnecting is also a simple way to manually reload a project on the iOS app, for example if you wish to explicitly refresh a remote data source (e.g. a JSON or RSS feed)