11–20 of 101 posts
My suggestion is keep offering it as OSS, but offer a hosted version as well.
I love the approach of having it show you the code (and diff) and control on writing it back. This seems like it may be very useful!
As an AOLPress user back in the day, it's both really surprising that in 2024 we don't have more WYSIWIYG tools, but also understandable because of how hard it is to design one.
Most tools end up trying to find a sweet spot between targeting a developer and targeting a designer, and as a result end up doing neither well. There's also the problem of what kind of code it generates, and how to generate good/maintainable code that doesn't tie you to the WYSIWYG tool for the rest of its life. I haven't had a chance to try this yet (though I plan to) so I'm not certain where it falls on each of these, but from the video I get the impression that you are well aware of these challenges.
Thanks for sharing, and thanks for making open source!
Edit: Adding a couple of question:
1. Are you planning to monetize? If so, what are some of your ideas?
2. What is the grand scope for Studio? It sounds like the immediate focus is on editing styles. Are you planning to keep the scope limited to that, or would this eventually become an everything-you-need-for-building-a-website type of tool?
A bit off-topic, but this landing page "steals" my cursor, presumably for that special hero effect, which makes it dizzingly laggy and unresponsive.
A bit off-topic, but this landing page "steals" my cursor, presumably for that special hero effect, which makes it dizzingly laggy and unresponsive.
Watch out for trademarks. Your slogan “The power of WebFlow for your React app” is going to attract attention from Webflow’s legal department if your project is successful.
This looks pretty awesome but, speaking only for myself here, the thing I actually want is just Webflow but without the BS and predatory pricing. A visual editor that produces plain old HTML, CSS, JS and that anyone in our company can use to make changes to pages or create new ones. That's it. I don't think it exists (if so, pointers would be very welcome!), so here's my comment to incentivize someone to build it.
I'm optimistic about this though, because my suspicion is that since this tool just exports React, you could relatively easily achieve this using Next.js SSG building. As long as you aren't doing any build time or runtime dynamic data loading, by adding one more step you can use this for that, with the bonus that if complexity goes up to the point where you would want to componentize, your tool is ready for that.
Looks great. Any plan to make it work in a browser instead of having to install an Electron app?
It was initially a Chrome extension [1] but there were limitations with local file access and UX from jumping around to multiple pages. Very early on I developed this as a web app but it was also difficult to inject styles into iframe, especially for ones that we didn't own directly.
Electron ships Chromium by default so it was easy to leverage into an editable browser plus allowing us to do an infinite canvas style editor. If you know of ways around these limitations please let me know. I'm always trying to figure out a way to turn this into a web app instead.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/onlook/icbcddooibfg...
Looks great. Any plan to make it work in a browser instead of having to install an Electron app?
A bit off-topic, but this landing page "steals" my cursor, presumably for that special hero effect, which makes it dizzingly laggy and unresponsive.
Watch out for trademarks. Your slogan “The power of WebFlow for your React app” is going to attract attention from Webflow’s legal department if your project is successful.