How's it different from something like reka.js or builder.io?
Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app
51–60 of 101 posts
Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app
#52Looks interesting. One word of advice - the CTA "talk to a founder" makes me stop and think. I wondered to myself "why would I want to talk to a founder?" You don't want the user doing that, it should be obvious. I'm pretty sure that button is for a demo, so you want to phrase it in terms of the value to the user, i.e. "schedule a demo" or some variant thereof.
Good catch, thank you. Changed it to schedule a demo.
Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app
#53How's it different from something like reka.js or builder.io?
To my understanding, Reka is more of a core no-code builder library while we're an implementation of it. Now I'm considering if we should use Reka to build out the rest of the editor.
With Builder.io, you have to set up a component to inject their UI into your app. It's more difficult to set up and maintain the components. We're opting to give full control of the code. You can develop with Onlook locally without internet for example.
Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app
#54This looks cool. I always thought that Webflow's model for how to snap together a UI was a good intersection of pick-up-and-play simplicity and just enough customizability under the hood. But they're a bit expensive, and I hated having my projects under their control. I hope this project continues to grow by leaps and bounds!
Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app
#55I think you're onto something. I'm not sure what you mean by 'components' on the roadmap, but if it's the ability to bring react components back into the editor, and have the designer WYSIWYG modify the props - that's the exact thing we've been saying "suuurely this must exist" for a long time (rant mode enabled).
The key pain for us that I think you're touching on is that "design/dev mode" isn't how teams actually work. Devs do far more design than we think. My experience is that designers do the pretty or complex pieces, while dev does the long tail "boring" designs. Often devs do the screen layouts since nav and routing can get a bit complex. Secondly, designers don't just hand off a design and that's it. The design system gets implemented as components, which have tweaks due to usability/issue reports/further design, and then the designers really want to be taking those components and recomposing them back into sections and screens. Ideally designers would be just setting props like images, text and ids faaaar up the abstraction layers, with dev components being automatically synced back in as they're built and updated.
So definitely think your setup is potentially hitting a sweet spot between dev/design. Just to validate it as as product - plus one for open source with a paid hosted tier for convenience. Devs get to tinker, and designers don't have to think about how to run it.
Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app
#56The 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?
I consider that zone to be a new "sweet spot". A new generation of "web devs" can circle around a tool like this. Our current in-house tool is a drag and drop editor that allows slices of content to be stacked. Each of these slices has preprogrammed selectable options for things like colors, sizes, body copy, headlines, etc. We consider this far too limiting. Now I will agree that my use of Webflow had me beating my fist against my desk. I could do the same thing in straight HTML in 15 minutes, that took me an hour or so in Webflow. Much of that was the learning curve; figuring out "the Webflow way". I see a future where we have tons of people who are good at these low-code/no-code tools. Sure I can run circles around them by being able to write all the code by hand. But for most things they'll be "good enough".
Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app
#57The 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?
I consider that zone to be a new "sweet spot". A new generation of "web devs" can circle around a tool like this. Our current in-house tool is a drag and drop editor that allows slices of content to be stacked. Each of these slices has preprogrammed selectable options for things like colors, sizes, body copy, headlines, etc. We consider this far too limiting. Now I will agree that my use of Webflow had me beating my…
>I consider that zone to be a new "sweet spot". A new generation of "web devs" can circle around a tool like this.
The problem there (and this is from experience building and supporting such a tool for non-technical users) is that people learn. Anyone who spends enough time in one of these tools will quickly pick up the fundamentals enough to become frustrated with the limitations. Or their engineering team will see the inneficient code being created and take it upon themselves to just implement these things quickly and simply. So you can start leaking the abstraction and allowing custom CSS/HTML, but then you very quickly arrive at a place that is useless for both teams.
Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app
#58This looks cool. I always thought that Webflow's model for how to snap together a UI was a good intersection of pick-up-and-play simplicity and just enough customizability under the hood. But they're a bit expensive, and I hated having my projects under their control. I hope this project continues to grow by leaps and bounds!
They’re more than just a little bit expensive when it comes to small builds and trying things out. It’s impractical to pick up as a part time hack.
Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I consider that zone to be a new "sweet spot". A new generation of "web devs" can circle around a tool like this. Our current in-house tool is a drag and drop editor that allows slices of content to be stacked. Each of these slices has preprogrammed selectable options for things like colors, sizes, body copy, headlines, etc. We consider this far too limiting. Now I will agree that my use of Webflow had me beating my…
>I consider that zone to be a new "sweet spot". A new generation of "web devs" can circle around a tool like this. The problem there (and this is from experience building and supporting such a tool for non-technical users) is that people learn. Anyone who spends enough time in one of these tools will quickly pick up the fundamentals enough to become frustrated with the limitations. Or their engineering team will see…
This argument is akin to saying we shouldn’t have hammers because tradespeople will move on to use nail guns once they have experience.
There is a place for both. You don’t need to spend much time on here, reddit, or many other forums to find people complaining about the lack of decent middle ground tooling to get started with front end dev.
Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app
#60This 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.
but this is a tough problem with constant maintenance involved and you want it solved for free and handed to you on a silver platter
have you considered paying developers or supporting open source software? I doubt it.