Tutorial / 3 min read

Design your app

By Graham / September 04, 2024

Setting up your account

Your first view of Reptile will be the name you signed up with. You are the Publisher, or Account Holder. All of your app projects for yourself, or your clients, will live under your account. 

You can change the name of your account in the Settings tab to the right and also upload a Cover Image for your account ie your company logo. 

This is useful if you end up creating several accounts. I am now branded Lion Agency when I log into the CMS.

Let's create a new Project

The New Project button gives us two choices: What type of project would you like to create? App or Web.

Web is the desktop viewer, app is the native iOS and Android app-builder. For this Tutorial choose App. Give your project a name ie "Lion App" and then you currently have four choices:

Start from Blank - this will load no content, themes or templates

Campaign, Scientific, Elegant - prepared content libraries, themes and templates. We recommend you load one of these the first time to familiarise yourself with Reptile.

Your project now appears with a blank cover image.

Click into it and you will find the pre-prepared app project which you set-up. In this case Campaign.

Note: Reptile puts you by default in the Content area of the CMS - highlighted in blue on the top right nav bar. To navigate to the app design screen you need to choose the My app icon on the far right. 

To create your app you will now be working between these two areas: Content and App. 

What is the difference? 

The App area is where you set up all the screens which you app will use. The home screen, which is the first thing they see when they open your app. You build these pages using components which display your content according to the rules you set.

Content is what appears in the screens and the widgets. In Reptile you do not build an app with static images in the screens, you build it by pointing a widget to a folder which contains your images and other content.

This way your app will update dynamically when you update that content. If you were to build it with static content in the tiles the only way to change it would be through the app template.    

Review

1. Click on the + New Project
2. In the overlay screen give it a name.
3. The next screen ask you to start from blank or choose an existing style. Load an existing theme.
4. You now have a container named for your app.
5. You can switch between the app view and the content view  

Next up - designing your app