Working with Components

Keep trigger and response names visible

It is very important to annotate your code with what it is actually doing, but keeping the trigger and response names helps someone new to the project (or you in three month's time.

parseJson gives no error message

parseJson is.a very useful and powerful function, but it doesn't do all you might expect of it (yet, hopefully).

Use Components

It will often seem as though it will be faster to use individual elements than to use components, but in the end the time saving almost always goes the other way.

Using the wrong mental model for Protopie

Most prototyping tools for designers use the frame-by-frame, or multiple dartboards model. But Protopie is much closer to a developer's object-oriented model of an application UI.

Origami Studio, Figma and others

How do these other popular platforms compare?

Use overridable variables in components

By using an overridable variable in your components you can have many instances of the component in your scene, but with different values for the same variable.

How to inspect variables inside a component

Even all-Scenes variables are not accessible inside a component. And this can lead to hard to find errors when a variable with the same name is used in a component, but its value is not sync'd with the scenes.

Put code inside components

Protopie code can get complex and hard to follow surprisingly quickly. Putting as much code as possible within your components can keep your main scenes simpler and cleaner.

Sending a message to another scene

Check if your other pie is present

Distinctive initial variable values

Good Prototyping Practice

parseJson gives no error message

Sending and receiving mismatched messages