ARC Welder: Invisible Dropdowns

Those of you using ARC Welder to test apps may have noticed a problem with "invisible dropdowns" when trying to set the recommended Orientation (Portrait) and Form Factor (Phone) on first use. As shown below, the triangle points upward when the selector is clicked, but the dropdown is not visible.

This appears to be intermittent and is a recent problem, possibly introduced with the current version of ARC Welder in early August. The dropdowns are in fact still active, but are invisible: it is therefore still possible to select the desired Orientation and Form Factor by clicking once to open the dropdown (triangle points upwards), and then clicking where the desired option should appear, by reference to the images below. Typically the desired settings are Portrait for Orientation, and Phone for Form Factor.

 

While not ideal, and potentially difficult to have students do successfully, this at least allows the orientation and form factor of ARC Welder to be set to match the apps created by App Inventor. On the positive side, it only needs to be done once per session, provided ARC Welder is not closed.

The images with the dropdowns visible as expected were taken from the version of Chrome Portable and ARC Welder provided on a USB during the Smart Skills Training sessions. This may be a viable alternative, at the cost of needing to manually copy Chrome Portable onto every student PC, and ensuring that students open Chrome Portable and not the normal Chrome installation when using App Inventor and ARC Welder.