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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?

#121

Post by tluyben2 »

brandmeyer wrote: post #42

I agree with the other's regarding the dynamic nature of the content. In addition, the widgets themselves haven't changed all that much for desktop GUI's. WxWidgets, Win32, Gtk, and Qt have mostly the same basic set of controls today that they had 15 years ago. Just imagine the extra R&D churn it would consume if you also had to update your GUI editor every time you changed a web UI control!

But you can create a custom control (not as nicely as Delphi has that covered) which can be packaged and documented and then reused. With web, because of CSS this is a problem; shove your custom html control in another page and it suddenly looks bad, not because of a few colors and a bit of alignment (like it would be on the desktop), but because of different framework use, different layouts, clashing css etc. It is a pain compared but he, it is what it is for now.

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

#122

Post by tluyben2 »

mmjaa wrote: post #44

I think they're there, you just need to find them. For example, here's a pretty good one: http://h5mag.com/

For niches there are many and many are making big money inside that niche. As generic tool it is much harder. You can turn things around, if possible, but letting your designer use such a tool. Then she is locked inside this constraint to make it look nice. Ours, rightfully, as head design, does not want to do that and I believe many won't though.

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

#123

Post by tluyben2 »

Retric wrote: post #81

The real issue is a huge WYSIWYG : HTML mismatch. You want HTML that looks different on different screens, handles blind users, and gracefully degrades to still work on IE 6, early iOS, etc. Meanwhile designers using WYSIWYG tend to build applications that work just fine in their environment and nowhere else.

You want that but in reality, how often does it happen for popular sites? The small startup sites no one will ever visit are ready for the handicapped, slow connections, work on every browser and mobile while my banks, airlines and others I need and/or visit daily barely work for normal users on high powered desktops. And the bad apps they have. Oh boy. They would benefit from a more generic bootstrap/react based wysiwyg component approach.

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

#124

Post by intrasight »

edwinjm wrote: post #93
intrasight wrote: post #25

The software industry largely decided to use HTML for the front end, it also largely gave up the 20 years of R&D on GUI design tools for existing semantically rich front-end frameworks. If Motif were FOSS or if CMU hadn't handed license rights to Andrew WM to IBM, we'd have probably avoided this whole mess that is HTML.

Haha. Do a google image search for "motif gui" and you'll see the most horrible interfaces made by men.

That like looking at Windows 3.1 screenshots and saying Windows 10 is horrible. Obviously thing would have evolved and improved. My point is that it was encumbered by licensing issues and therefore wasn't adopted.

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

#125

Post by fiveseven_ »

briantmaurer wrote: post #100
jasondc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the best visual approach ive seen to designing flexbox layouts: http://flexboxgame.com

This is great. Until now, I have been using the "flex box froggy" game for reference. It has been faster for me to recall flex-box CSs rules by scrolling through levels in that game than reading any "real" documentation. The link you shared above is a big upgrade.

Flexbox Game doesn't support Firefox 53 yet, but I can vouch for Flexbox Froggy as well as Flexbox Defense http://www.flexboxdefense.com/

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

#127

Post by salmo »

91bananas wrote: post #83
nip wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can afford not to support IE9 [1], you don't need a 500K - 1MB framework to center vertically and horizontally by using flexbox (align-items: center; justify-content: center) on the parent container. [1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox

Or you can support it but not give them vertically centered content. Screw em. If they want it to be 5 years ago, let them be 5 years ago. FIVE!

I like to call this degrading gracefully :)

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

#128

Post by ilaksh »

Having used many great visual dev tools over the years but also generally mainly focusing on code, especially in the HTML world, and having had many discussions on this topic over the years, I can promise you that it is a cultural/social failure rather than a technical issue.

It comes down to this: programmers write code. If you build your UI or whatever graphically without writing code, then you are not a programmer -- you are a user. The last thing any programmer wants to be is a lowly user. So programmers have a natural motivation to not make these tools better or try to use them. And it becomes part of the culture to not use visual tools, and naturally having rarely used them and never trying to improve them and the fact that they diminish their job towards more user-like behaviors, programmers often do not find them useful.

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