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Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

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Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#111

Post by lj3 »

alkonaut wrote: post #101
fiveseven_ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here's a non-flexbox solution, but the parent element has to have a set height: .parent { position: relative; } .child { position: absolute; top: 50%; left: 50%; transform: translate(-50%, -50%); }

It's like a magic spell that makes very little sense and is impossible to guess. If I fire up a reasonable layout system (Xaml for example) which is completely foreign, it's trivial to do there. I can't understand why html/CSS makes it so hard.

Because html/css was never intended to be used for layout. It's primarily a content styling system for static documents.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#112

Post by redindian75 »

drdaeman wrote: post #18

There was a time when they were popular. Then, such tools were declared "uncool" (not without good reasons - the markup wasn't particularly good) by semantic markup movement, around the time of tables-vs-divs wars. Semantics had withered away since then. No one cared, and it eventually got replaced with a bunch of s on the DOM side and JS-virtual-DOM-all-the-way on how it's generated and managed. Editors haven't caug…

totally agree - I remember that war! For simple layouts (even works on email clients) nothing to beat a well designed Table.... it just works :)

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#113

Post by redindian75 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

In terms of easily cranking out a CRUD app, the current state of the art in web front-end development is a long ways behind Visual Basic 4 which was released in 1995.

37Signal's new tool GoMix [1] is being billed as an answer to that. I was squarely on that target group, but I gave up on that after a few tries... It was supposed to be simple, but never understood conceptually.

[1]https://gomix.com/

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#114

Post by redindian75 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #78

Most programmers are not very good at visual thinking IME. I have a bet with myself that by 2025 natural language processing will be good enough (combined with other UI tools) for designers to explain what they want directly to the computer and a great many programmers are going to be sitting around wondering what the hell happened.

> Most programmers are not very good at visual thinking IME.

As a visual thinker, I cannot wrap my head around even simple programming concepts - they seem SO alien to me :)

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#115

Post by alkonaut »

lj3 wrote: post #111
alkonaut wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like a magic spell that makes very little sense and is impossible to guess. If I fire up a reasonable layout system (Xaml for example) which is completely foreign, it's trivial to do there. I can't understand why html/CSS makes it so hard.

Because html/css was never intended to be used for layout. It's primarily a content styling system for static documents.

Html/CSS have been revised a few times since then, so you'd think that the design should gravitate towards making the common things easy.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#116

Post by scarface74 »

smilesnd wrote: post #60

In my experience frontend editors that designers use generate horrible code. Just as it is turtles all the way down. For frontend editors it is tables all the way down. My first web job was modifying CMS. Someone would tell me put a green box here with inputs for this and that. Then it would go to a designer to change the fonts, and get rid of the square corners. Then the guy would want it moved 5px to the left so it…

Yes those were the bad old days when we used nested tables for layout with rows and columns. We are much more sophisticated now. We use nested divs with classes like "row" and "col-md-6".....

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#117

Post by meredydd »

redindian75 wrote: post #107
meredydd wrote: post #17

My take, as someone who sells a visual web-app creator (see my profile): If you want it to work well, the UI model of a visual editor has to match up with the data model of the application behind it. Visual Basic worked so well because the objects you manipulated in code were the same components you dragged and dropped onto your window. We already have way too many (and too complex) representations of application sta…

How can u skip HTML/JS stack for websites? Is your editor only for apps?

We compile the client-side Python code to Javascript using Skulpt (http://skulpt.org), and we render the visual components in HTML, but you interact with them entirely in Python.

This creates a much less "leaky" abstraction than building a new framework directly on top of HTML/JS. It also lets us offer things like blocking I/O operations (no more callback hell!).

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#118

Post by redindian75 »

Here are some GUI Tools which are showing promise. (not affiliated with any of them)

Here were my basic needs:

* Ability to be understood by a non coder (not necessarily web novice).

* Simple Reusable Components - Drag & Drop tools to create simple CRUD apps

* Code Generation - Have enough scaffolded code generated to hand off to a coder to wire it up. (from Elance etc)

* Work on at least 2 of 3 platforms - WebApp (JS, React or Vue), iOS & Android

* Have ability to create simple logics - If/Then or Show/Hide or even JSON digestion

Here are the tools:

https://neonto.com/reactstudio - A drag n drop Mac tool for developing React apps. All three platforms.

http://creolabs.com - Design tool for Mac (this guy rewrote UIKit). Only Native ios/android. No Webapp.

https://www.protopie.io - Prototypes for now, simple code export on the way.

http://www.appgyver.io - Data Driven drag/drop webapp. All 3 platforms.

https://creator.ionic.io - GUI tool for Ionic (Angular).All 3 platforms.

https://material.io/stage/ - Google's upcoming tool (From Pixate & Form team). Unknown.

https://polymer-designer.appspot.com/ - A Crude Polymer layout tool, looks like Google abandoned it.

http://www.getnoodl.com/

Prototyping tools like Facebook Origami (http://origami.design/) have refused to spit out code. So I didn't even bother learning it.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#119

Post by syrrim »

bsaul wrote: post #48
drabiega wrote: post #20

Visual editors work great when the thing will always look the way you've designed it. But that's not how the web works. Especially now that mobile web browsing is a common thing, your site will be viewed on all sorts of devices with different resolutions / aspect ratios / etc. When you add that factor in it shouldn't be hard to see why a visual editor is not sufficient. Visual editors are just not a great way to spec…

interface builder ( xcode ), does it well for iOS. You can preview you UI instantly for ipad / iphone in both portait and landscape. i think the reason the equivalent doesn't exists for web is maybe due to the complexity of css / html, and the various level of browser support, which makes all of it a dark art as soon as you aim for wide device support. Whereas Apple controls everything.

The equivalent does sortof exist. You can of course preview your layout in the browser, and chrome (and possibly others) allows you to change the dimensions to reflect mobile devices. You can also link the source code in dev tools to a file, and edit the page live.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#120

Post by tluyben2 »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #86
beaconstudios wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is what's shocking to me - I will confess, I partly started this thread to investigate whether there was an opportunity to start a company around making web front-end development suck less. The fact that we hand-write the most fine-grained basic stuff in 2017 is odd for such a technical industry. Shoot me an email (my address is in my profile) if you'd like to check it out when it's ready!

Check out Rails. You could make a static header and footer template for all pages in Dreamweaver or whatever, then for the dynamic parts, the code is very simple. GUI editors can't do this because they don't have a good way to specify what you want to be templated and what you want to be dynamic, and how/when to display those dynamic parts.

Every framework has that though and most have had that since inception. That is not really the point. You want to be able to do the 'cannot do this' points too.
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