Blocks moved to strange places

[Jonathan Horne]

Ever since i started collapsing blocks, after I save and exit the window, the next time I open the window, the collapsed blocks will be in strange places, it will usually actually detach itself from the code it should be in, move to a place very far away from any other code, so i have to search through a lot of white area to find it, and when i do, it is just the blue gear box surrounded by strange symbols instead of the block graphic.  I would really like some suggestions to fix this, because I have a lot of blocks, and I need to be able to collapse blocks for this program to be manageable.

[SteveJG]

Here are a couple of things to try:

1) Clear your browser cache, close the browser and restart.

2) Switch browsers.

We do know that strange things happen when programming with App Inventor and a project gets HUGE from the point of the number of blocks.  Some of this might be amelioriated by using some of the suggestions provided by Enis      http://twodogapps.com/?page_id=686   . 

Collapsing blocks does make use of the other blocks still visible generally easier; however I have noticed strange responses that seem to be related to  collapsing a Procedure or an event handler that contains a Disabled block.  Removing the disabled block from the Collapsed block code in my situation fixed the problem       

Some of what you see might be hardware related; that is DSL speed, your Mac's RAM memory or a general 'slowness' of the Internet and the ability of Google's Cloud server to handle your Project.

The Moderator's generally recommend users refrain from building Projects with many multiple screens and encourage building projects with only a single screen.  Building on a single screen means eventually that screen will have a LOT of code blocks associated with it.  At some point, I expect the App Inventor compiler and Blockly (which is the Google provided system of displaying Blocks) can no longer efficiently handle the number of blocks.   A developer's project may become too large to be coded in App Inventor.  A too large project may be your issue Jonathan.

Suggestions?    With the amount of information you provided about your Project, specific help is speculation.   If everything is on a single screen, moving some of your code to an additional screen might mitigate the too many block issues as might the suggestions on Enis's blog page.   If part of the problem (and the word is if ) is hardware and use of the Cloud, you might consider using a third party version of App Inventor running on your own server (within you Mac); that might help.  I do not know, you would have to try it; alternatively perhaps it is time to graduate to Android Studio of B4A compilers?

App Inventor coding is incredibly inefficient compared to Projects built with professional compilers like Android Studio.  It is a price paid for simplicity and coding with ease.

Let us know what you discover Jonathan.

Regards,

Steve