Introducing Aptly, the Software Platform that Turns Ideas into Working Apps

@Selim_Tezel This announcement is causing confusion unfortunately.

Is Apty available for the community to experiment with now? It does not appear to be available. If the community can experiment, could you please provide a link? At the moment, there is not a link. This feature appears interesting; however it appears to just be an announcement describing research.

Thanks. :cry:

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Hi SteveJG, thanks for your message. Yes the project is currently only in the research phase and not available to the public. The video linked demonstrates a proof of concept rather than a finished product. Prof. Hal Abelson's linked blog may help clarify things. Our amazing Dev lead Evan, who is the main force behind the Aptly platform, will be back next week and should be able to answer any technical and timing questions. Best wishes.

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Great! Evan for extraordinary support in community and adding milestones in creating Mobile App in very and very simple way.:+1:

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Unfortunately for the moment we cannot make it public due to OpenAI's approval policies. Longer term we do want to make it available to people to try. There is a separate issue related to cost that we also need to figure out.

We provide a number of example projects in Aptly to OpenAI's Codex. As we add more examples, we are able to generate more/better outputs. However, Codex limits the total transaction to about 16kb, so we can only provide a limited number of inputs as examples. We're hoping that some day OpenAI will allow for fine tuning so that we can feed more examples of App Inventor projects for better coverage. We are investigating alternative approaches in the meantime.

In a different video I had created earlier, I was able to get Aptly to compose a new project from three example projects where the example projects demonstrated a different part of App Inventor that would eventually be needed to build the final app. We believe that eventually with a large number of examples of small pieces of App Inventor the system might be able to compose rather sophisticated programs.

One of the key pieces of Aptly is that it allows for modeling App Inventor programs as text so that they can be used with text-based tools like Codex, and then any text based programs can be converted back into App Inventor (i.e., the Aptly language is 1 to 1 mapped with the App Inventor language). Therefore, some day you might even have Aptly trained on apps residing right in your account, or from the power users, etc.

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Hmm, that is a good question. We provide the descriptions in English that are used as examples for Codex, but Codex itself is a tuned version of GPT-3, which tends to be able to translate between languages. If you could give me a description in another language (I'd prefer not to just automatically translate since it may not be accurate), I could try it out and we could see what happens.

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My example of the text in Dutch.

Maak een app met een tekstbox, een lijst met zes talen en een knop met de tekst "vertalen". Wanneer er op de knop wordt gedrukt dan vertaal je de tekst in de geselecteerde taal en laat de vertaling zien.

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So it's not perfect but it does come up with something:

Screen1 = Screen(AppName = "Vertalen")
TextBox1 = TextBox(Screen1, Text = "")
LanguageList = ListView(Screen1, ElementsFromString = "en,nl,fr,de,es,it")
TranslateButton = Button(Screen1, Text = "Translate")
Translator1 = Translator(Screen1)

when TranslateButton.Click():
    call Translator1.RequestTranslation(lists_select_item(["en", "nl", "fr", "de", "es", "it"], LanguageList.Selection), TextBox1.Text)

when Translator1.GotTranslation(responseCode, translation):
    set TextBox1.Text = translation

Importantly, it seems to still use the English "Translate" for the button text. There's also a logic bug in that Codex selects the Selection property rather than SelectionIndex to look up the entry in the list. Of course, that logic could be simplified to just LanguageList.Selection rather than this weird lookup in the list, but I think that's partly because we don't have enough examples for Codex to recognize the relationship between the ElementsFromString property and the Selection property.

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Nice first try. :grin:

Note that this is based on 14 example programs from App Inventor. We expect that once we have the ability to fine tune our own model with many more App Inventor apps that the performance will greatly increase.

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Creative, Nice

What is the progress on Aptly? The original blog was posted in March 22.

We've been working on implementing editing capabilities for Aptly, so that while you're working on a project you can hit Ctrl/Cmd+E to bring up a dialog and enter in a suggested change. It will then try to update the project accordingly. I also before the Christmas break integrated some preliminary support for DALL-E 2 so you can use it to create image content for your apps (e.g., "make the button have an image of a cat curled up next to a dog in the style of Claude Monet"). We need to generate some new materials and I'm hoping that we can start inviting people to beta test it this year.