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Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

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Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#31

Post by DrewADesign »

lukan wrote: post #27
DrewADesign wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I would change that wording immediately. Even being pretty savvy with this stuff, I thought this was an open-sourced webflow when I skimmed it and I assure you, if they even vaguely consider this a future threat to any of their business at all, their counsel will use it as a legal cudgel to bludgeon you.

I agree "the power of webflow" implies a connection. "inspired by webflow" would be probably better, but even there I am not sure if it is safe enough.

Absolutely. If I came out with a project that said "Get the power of Oracle with a simple javascript API" people would think I had a new Oracle API for javascript, not that I had a JS-friendly database I thought was as good as Oracle. But before I even mentioned webflow at all, I'd first want to make sure they didn't have any related patents I'd be bumping up against without being able to clearly show prior art. Only after that might I consider saying "webflow-style workflow" or something along those lines. It's sad, but you have to assume their lawyers will use every legal tool at their disposal to protect their client's bottom line whether its reasonable or not.

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#32

Post by hoakiet98 »

freedomben wrote: post #18
patrickaljord wrote: post #8

Looks great. Any plan to make it work in a browser instead of having to install an Electron app?

Having it edit local files might be a difficulty of having it work in a browser instead of electron app. That said though, Electron apps I've worked with in the past usually have a "dev" mode already that just serves locally and you hit it with your browser (i.e npm run dev), and that browser allows using the APIs normally not allowed so long as it's being served from localhost. Might be a good solution.

> that just serves locally and you hit it with your browser

This is an interesting take. My interpretation: You can host this on a server, then expose a port remotely which will have all the access of the electron app, making it a pseudo SAAS?

I will need to test this out but this has some cool implications. The other worry is multiple client support but you can just provision a personal instance.

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#33

Post by pavlov »

hoakiet98 wrote: post #20
pavlov wrote: post #9

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.

Agreed. I was worried that it's derivative while trying to communicate what we do succinctly. I know Supabase does the same thing with Firebase but our wording might be more problematic.

I'm not a lawyer, but here's some high-level general suggestions from a specialist which could be helpful:

https://www.cohnlg.com/the-nuances-of-trademark-use-in-adver...

It looks like you've got a really nice product idea here! And Webflow has raised hundreds of millions, so they have a war chest for this kind of thing. I just don't want to see you run over later.

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#34

Post by rchaud »

freedomben wrote: post #16
rsp1984 wrote: post #10

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 agree. What I personally would love is a WYSIWYG front end to a static site generator that uses eex or erb. If the tool is sufficiently open source and works well with some hand tweaking of generated HTML, then eex/erb isn't strictly necessary. 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 lo…

Pinegrow Web Editor and Bootstrap Studio could fit the bill. No subscription, no cloud, one-time purchase. Exported HTML is fully readable and editable outside the app.

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#36

Post by hoakiet98 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #31
lukan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree "the power of webflow" implies a connection. "inspired by webflow" would be probably better, but even there I am not sure if it is safe enough.

Absolutely. If I came out with a project that said "Get the power of Oracle with a simple javascript API" people would think I had a new Oracle API for javascript, not that I had a JS-friendly database I thought was as good as Oracle. But before I even mentioned webflow at all, I'd first want to make sure they didn't have any related patents I'd be bumping up against without being able to clearly show prior art. Only…

Point taken, we'd do better without the headache for now until further legal counseling. Changing the tagline now. Thank you all for the suggestion!

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#38

Post by hoakiet98 »

freedomben wrote: post #16
rsp1984 wrote: post #10

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 agree. What I personally would love is a WYSIWYG front end to a static site generator that uses eex or erb. If the tool is sufficiently open source and works well with some hand tweaking of generated HTML, then eex/erb isn't strictly necessary. 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 lo…

> because my suspicion is that since this tool just exports React, you could relatively easily achieve this using Next.js SSG building

At the core, we generate pure HTML and CSS, then serialize those into React and Tailwind. It would be one less step to expose the HTML and CSS instead. I wanted a narrow scope to this so that's the focus but I imagine there's a plugin setup we can do to swap in what framework (or non-framework) you would need.

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#39

Post by hoakiet98 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #21
ramesh31 wrote: post #2

The main problem with these kind of tools is that they sit in a "dead zone" of being too in depth for non-technicals, yet too limiting and inefficient for engineers to bother with, as they end up injecting a huge bundle on the page just to render a form. How are you solving for that?

While that might be true at the moment, this is a (well designed) electron instance (edit: exists? I only saw install instructions for NPM so maybe it just needs built executables? it says it uses electron) away from being a modern replacement for WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver. I could see an easy integration to push your page up to a CDN or GH Pages instance. Even without, there are tons of places for moderately…

> I only saw install instructions for NPM so maybe it just needs built executables

Sorry for the confusion, this is an Electron app. I just didn't ship an executable with it at the moment.

> I could see an easy integration to push your page up to a CDN or GH Pages instance.

That is certainly in the cards. Though, in my opinion, it becomes more useful to edit complex web application since there are many tools supporting static sites but not many for production web apps.

> user needs often seem straightforward or even intuitive, but that’s heavily skewed by a completely different approach to using and reasoning about software than end users have

I am guilty of this. My long-long term hope is to be able to collaborate better with my product folks where they are able to enact their own intuition in the product instead of having to go through me for every change needed.

While this is easy for a marketing page, it's much more difficult to do in a complex application context.

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#40

Post by nalinidash »

minajevs wrote: post #7

A bit off-topic, but this landing page "steals" my cursor, presumably for that special hero effect, which makes it dizzingly laggy and unresponsive.

Though stealing the cursor is okay, having 2 cursors in the page without my own cursor was confusing.Also the lag is very apparent.
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