The most popular CMS, WordPress, is experimenting with this now:
- https://make.wordpress.org/design/2017/02/09/initial-gutenbe...
Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?
131–140 of 140 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?
#132Earlier 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.
That was a true statement in maybe 2005?
Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?
#133Earlier 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.
That was a true statement in maybe 2005?
Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?
#134Earlier 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.
I really like what safari has done with its devtools for the style editor.
Right-click inspect element selects the element you want to modify. Then change CSS properties in a GUI editor. Only problem is persistence.
I love designing and tweaking with devtools iteratively.
A lot of things are done in editors because it gives you a lot of control of logic. Designing assets in visual language like flash makes a lot of sense.
Unity has the same idea. Create your assets visually and assign behaviors to it via code. Their GUI/code fusion is pretty cool.
Writing a public var in a class exposes it in GUI and makes it bindable to other things via click and drag.
Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?
#135If Webflow could bump up its CMS abilities just a notch or two, and include a better template/design component it would be a knockout imho...
On this same note I would kill for someone to add this type of interface to Airtable.... An untapped market with most current solutions (knack, caspio, etc) not even close on graphic and layout possibilities.
Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?
#136Open chrome load a local file edit in the developer tools, profit!
Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?
#137The best current real-world example to look at would be Apple's Interface Builder for iOS. Why doesn't everyone use IB? The biggest reasons in my experience are: * Limited logic. A builder is fine for a simple static layout. How should that layout change depending on the data to be displayed? How should it adapt to different screen dimensions and orientations? Pretty soon you want to write code to control the view. *…
Back when I did Mac OS 9 development, we used Metrowerks' PowerPlant framework. Constructor, their GUI editor, made laying out user interfaces a joy. It just worked. When I came back to try iOS development, and saw the sad state of IB, I wondered how things had fallen so far. Then I tried Android development. Hand rolled XML layout of UI? NOPE. I too am surprised that no one has developed tools to just do this.
How was Constructor better than IB? And how did it deal with the issues I mentioned?
Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?
#138There's a huge separation between who designs the frontend and who implements the frontend. To date, none of the frontend editors are good enough to completely replace the need for a programmer to wire up actions. Even back in the Flash days, you needed an ActionScript programmer to make your webapp do anything meaningful. Since you need a programmer anyway, you might as well use a freeform design tool (Photoshop) to…
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Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...centering an object horizontally and vertically consistently is still a surprisingly difficult endeavor..." This is so true - even today. Oh wait, someone might state, "but there are frameworks you can simply integrate and they handle that kind of stuff for you, or at least make it easier"...To which I reply, do i really have to include ~500K - 1MB of some framework for this!?! Just silly that centering is an ann…
That was so easy with tables.
At the cost of poor performance on the client [1], so you're just pushing any time saved in development onto your user.
The only way around the poor performance of table layouts is to use table-layout: fixed, which then means you lose all responsive layout so you'd need to create a new version for every screen size you wanted to support (and implicitly, not be able to support every size of mobile screen since percentages don't play well with fixed layout. In this case, you haven't saved any time and in fact have created more work for yourself along with a worse version of your site since fewer people will be able to view it properly.
[1] http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2009/03/27/reflows-repai...
Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?
#140Creating UI by hand is ridiculous. It doesn't scale.
- All companies think they solve a unique problem, and believe that justifies creating a custom UI.
- All brands want as much exposure to users, which demands custom UI themes and styles.
- All devices have access to different I/O components, which implies completely different user interfaces.
- All users have different preferences and needs.
You can't design a one-size-fits-all UI taking all of the above considerations into account. You need to operate at a higher level of abstraction than "pixels on a screen".
The solution has been in front of us for decades. It's semantics.