[clarencemartin]

Components are Elements that can be used as "Objects" for your Appli Application (Really Cool Items). 
The idea is to create these components as shared Elements that can be used on one or many screens in your application.
When you take an Element and turn it into a Component,you can use these components on all or any screens that you create. For instance you may want to take a Text element and make it a title Item for your Application. It can be shared on any or all of the screens in your Application. Another Comonent that you make may be a group of Buttons that you group together as a Menu Block. If you make this item a component it can be used universally on your many screens as a common Menu Bar, That can have shared code to be used to open your various screens with a common low code Navigation action without having to code for every screen.
These Components can eleiminate dupilcate low code coding and make your Application have a UNIFORM Look and feel with minimum coding.
One idea might be: to create a base Sceen that has all of the common Cmponents that can be share with all of the other screens in your Application.
One other thing that I found (thanks Mark and Team), is the Components are Project Aware. Once they are created in a project, all of the other sub-projects created can share those components.
GIVE IT A TRY. I am sure that there will probably be a tutorial in the Blog sometime soon. If not, I might create a video showing the use of components.
HAPPY APPLI-ING!

[clarencemartin]

I forgot to mention-
To see your components, you need to click on the Asset Manager button - on the bottom left side of the screen (right-most Button) see pdf , included

[marktalluto]

Hi Clarence,

That is an excellent synopsis of the component feature. Clarence touches on the utility of the feature. The big idea is that if you modify the component on any screen, all the other uses of the component are updated as well. If you change a color, code, or any property, they stay in sync.

You can break any component usage away from the master to make it unique. You can even make a new component from the version is has been disconnected.

[clarencemartin]

My further exploration of the Assets Pane shows that there is a lot going on. Explore the Asset Pane and you will see other types of Compnents, namely the Colors and Text Components tools. Again a centralized area for shareable items in Appli.
These items are well thought out and it helps to explore these in order to understand how they work and the complexity in their development.
An expample would be: Once a component is added to a screen, that same component cannot be added to that screen again -either by clicking on the component or copy/paste. You must first disconnect the item from the Components and then you can copy/paste the item elsewhere on the screen.This shows how complete the design of these items actually is. The thoroughness of this design is awsome and makes sense.
I urge any Appli user to explore the Assets Pane.

[marktalluto]

The color portion of the asset manager will improve how we use color in our apps.

You can define a series of colors as swatches in your safe area of the app (outside of the white playground, the grey area). Draw boxes and set their colors as you see fit for your app. Add each color to the asset manager and name how you want to use them.

For example, you could name the color blue as buttons, grey as text, and white as background.

As your app is developing, you can test changing your buttons to another color from one place. Change the blue to something else in the asset manager, and all your buttons will change automatically. You can do this with all your elements. With a bit of discipline early on, developers will instantly benefit from testing color changes.